The following is an excerpt from the Novella currently being written for the film.

He stands at the stove, his back to her, stirring something in the pan with solemnity.  The solemnity is that of a man performing a ritual that he has not read instructions for.  He wears the same shirt he wore yesterday.  And the day before.  He stirs the pan clockwise.  The shirt has the looseness of perpetual forgiveness.  She stirs her coffee…counterclockwise.  She always stirs her coffee counterclockwise.  Were she to open her mouth you could count that every sentence she uttered was seven words long. Seven is an unholy number but she was pre forgiven, say, by persons unknown. He asks her a question; she could have answered, in the seven words that had become her new system of delivery…instead of the long, messy, generous downloads…and then…when her answers were received like small lovely packages, rather than boxes with warnings:  this side up.  A kettle whistles and the black cat jumps down and walks in a straight line to the bowl she has left for it, the bowl that is always filled to the line, filled on time.  

The house performs its small domestic miracles.  A door creaks innocently.  He listens far too long.  This is not a mystery nor a horror.  She looks at him…the stirring…she thinks of the rituals that originally bound them.  Those rituals have been replaced by other things, like podcasts, or unlimited access to streaming content.  The original rituals have not been stolen, much as reallocated.  She remembers the early days when he would cut a slice of cake for her first, ceremoniously, as if the act of offering were itself a kind of worship.  Now the offering is a checkbox, with a checkmark.  The kettle clicks off.  Outside a neighbor mows the lawn with cheerful brutality, with a devotion to order.  Wir mussen ordnung haben.

She looks his way again and reaches out slowly for the counter, for balance she doesn’t need but that objects give her.  She tests the new economy of herself.  Succinct, specific.  Brief. He looks at her.  He’s not waiting for the story to be told; he waits for the signal that it has been told correctly.  He called her by a new term of endearment.  It felt like forgery….a nickname used in front of friends that made her feel like a costume.  Red flag.  Red rover, move over.

And for a second, a foreign taste of something too early to savor…a tinge of revenge.  Isn’t what we really want the other’s pain?  Don’t we want them to know that their pain is not a cousin, but a partner to the pain they’ve caused us?  And we pause for science….the brain doesn’t like pain and tries to rebalance itself with pleasure.  But the fucker is that humans have evolved to feel intense pleasure from hurting the people who hurt them…or their proxies. 

Now acorns hammer the roof.  He looks up, like a cherub looking to a saint. She looks at him.  He was scraping the corner of a linen napkin with the nail of his pointer finger.  Maybe one last shake of the snow globe of her winter with this man might make it snow again.  The snow glistens and vanishes as quickly as it came.  Now a hand on the tea cup with the fissure.  His mom’s heirloom.  Suddenly ‘their’ belongings replace her belongings.  She starts doing things ‘his way’ without noticing.  She’s doing all the things right…she is doing everything right— for the marriage she no longer wants.