Three Long, Two Short

Your little sister is horrified when she sees the coffin standing in your living room.

“Is this yours?” she asks, immediately. Somehow, even though you haven’t mentioned it before, and two other people live in your home, she jumps to the right conclusion.

“It’s a project,” you try to explain. “Woodworking practice.” This is stretching the truth. You did put the coffin together yourself, but it came in kit form. Manouevring the largest pieces into place without the help of either your husband or boyfriend was the hardest part, not sawing or sanding.

“Well, why is it out here?” she asks. “In the living room. Where people might want to watch TV or eat snacks, not be reminded of the presence of death.” She hasn’t sat down yet. Instead, she’s been making a slow circuit of the room, eyes fixed on the coffin, as far away from it as she can get.

It looks somewhat comical, especially when she bumps into a bookcase, but you aren’t about to tell her that.

“This is the biggest room in the flat.” Also, your husband refused point-blank to let you put it in the bedroom.

It’s at that moment that your boyfriend walks in. Since you happen to be facing the door, you catch the moment he sees her and his soft expression sharpens into a sneer.

“I like it,” he says, hopping onto the back of the sofa and swinging his feet over onto the cushions. “Practical. We can use it as a coffee table.” He waves at the tray in your hands, which holds mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits. “You gonna put that down?”

“Not till it’s been varnished,” you say automatically.

Your boyfriend reaches out a grasping hand and you drift closer, until he can hook a chocolate digestive off the plate and lean in for a kiss.

Behind you, you hear your sister groan, and then—“Wait. Is this a sex thing?”

“No—” you say, at the same time as he says, “It could be.” He’s waggling his eyebrows at her over your shoulder.

“Gross. You are so gross, what the fuck?” She comes closer, though she keeps you in between herself and your boyfriend. “Look, I need to get moving if I’m going to get to the post office before they shut. Thanks for the tea, no thanks for the insight into your sex life with that creep.”

She squeezes your shoulders, takes a deep swig from one of the mugs, and grabs two biscuits, shoving them into her hoodie pocket. Then she’s gone.

Your boyfriend takes the tray out of your hands and sets it down somewhere, before pulling you down to stick his welcome tongue into your mouth. Wherever he put the tray, you know it wasn’t on top of the coffin. He’s refused to touch it, will hardly look at it, since you brought the pieces home.

Your husband won’t let you close the coffin lid without him there.

It’s a reasonable concern. You admit that. Even though the coffin is a very simple one, designed for people who care more about practicality than the ‘comfort’ of a dead body, the lid is still heavy, and you can’t lift it into place by yourself—not from inside, at least. You’ve had some ideas about hinges and wires, but no time to implement them yet. He’s made some pointed remarks about air holes. You haven’t got around to those yet either.

He didn’t want to hear the details of the calculations you made, but you manage to bargain him up to five minutes with the lid closed, and him standing beside the coffin to keep watch. One minute at first, and then another four if you’re all right.

It’s surprisingly comfortable to lie down inside it with just a folded blanket underneath you. Your husband cups the side of your face in his hand, eyes stricken.

“I love you,” he says. You shiver. It feels odd to hear him say that so directly.

“I’m fine,” you tell him. “You can put it down now.”

When the lid is sealed, the blackness inside the coffin is absolute. You did a good job after all. You feel your whole body relax, so fast you half-worry that you’re fainting, so completely that your husband’s knock on the wooden coffin wall sounds like it comes from another dimension. It’s a struggle to lift your hand high enough to knock back, to signal that you’re really okay.

The first minute passes in the blink of an eye. You squeeze your eyes shut against the light and try to smile up at his silhouette: it’s fine, it’s good, put me back in the dark.

Four minutes feel like eternity, which is to say, they’re enough for you to lose your grip on time entirely. There’s nothing passing through your head. The wooden surface you’re lying on presses up against you, muted by the blanket, and then fades out of your awareness. Even the sound of your breathing, which was startlingly loud at first in the enclosed space, has drifted away.

This time, when your husband lifts away the lid, he reaches down to take you in his arms. You jolt a little, limbs already stiff as if you’d been lying for much longer than you have, and tuck your face into his warm neck, allow him to pull you up into a sitting position.

He’s breathing hard, almost gulping for air, and it feels like he’s the only thing in the universe—his hot, solid body, his mouth against the side of your face, the way that he waited for you even though it tormented him.

It takes a few months to get him to work up to leaving you in the coffin for twenty minutes at a time. He waits for you every time, standing by the coffin or sitting at the head of it, leaning against the wall. You’re sure you could go for an hour, now that you’ve drilled the holes he insisted on, but you don’t want to push him too far.

Your boyfriend won’t even stay in the building when you do this. You don’t want to push him out of his own home, either. Still, though you can’t explain why, you need it. There’s a peace that comes when you’re lying hidden in your coffin, a strange feeling of rightness.

It helps you get through the days in between more easily, knowing you have that empty calm to return to.

Once the three layers of varnish have been carefully stroked on and left to dry—and once you’ve consulted books and the internet on how to avoid dust getting caught in the finish, and added a last coat following all of that advice—the coffin is finished. It still looks simple, almost cartoonishly so, but that’s how you wanted it.

You still haven’t added anything to the interior besides the single blanket. The occasional visitor who isn’t freaked out by its presence in your living room sometimes asks if you wear a sleep mask inside it, or noise-cancelling headphones, and you reply that those aren’t necessary. Even without the lid, you’ve fallen asleep in there a few times by now.

One afternoon, when showers of warm spring rain have been passing across the sky since mid-morning, you carefully drag the coffin out onto the balcony. It’s a close fit, and awkward work by yourself to lift the heavy box over the raised threshold of the balcony door. It’s worth it, though. You lie out there for hours once it’s done, listening to birdsong through the patter of raindrops. The sun that periodically breaks through the clouds warms you, and then the wind chills you again, and that feels right, too.

You’re in the kitchen chopping vegetables that evening when you hear your husband get back in.

“Oh thank god, it’s gone,” he says as soon as he enters the living room.

“Nope,” replies your boyfriend, popping the P. “It’s out on the balcony. He wanted to listen to the rain in it.”

“I can hear you both, you know,” you call out to them.

Your husband comes into the kitchen and kisses you on the lips. (Your boyfriend stays where he is, making notes on some fiendishly complicated paper that might be for his research, or might just be for fun; you can’t tell. Either way, it seems to have his full attention, but you know he’ll be listening in to the two of you.)

“The room looks bigger with the extra space free,” your husband says. “Brighter, too. How was your day?”

“It was good.” You scrape the vegetables into the wok with the flat of your knife. “Quiet. Your tulips are starting to come up.”

“What do you think about leaving it out there, now it’s finished and the weather’s getting warm? It’ll make it a lot easier to move around indoors. I won’t have to worry about tripping over it when I get up at five a.m.”

“It’s still not really watertight,” you protest. “They’re not designed for standing around outdoors.”

“They’re designed to be put underground,” your husband retorts, and then his jaw clenches and his lips go pale.

From outside the kitchen, you hear the sound of your boyfriend’s laptop snapping shut and the bang of the bedroom door.

“Okay. I’ll think about it,” you say. You drop the spatula you’re holding into the wok, handle resting on the rim of the pan in the way your boyfriend hates, but your husband never notices. Slowly, carefully, you shuffle over to hug him, tucked against his chest with one arm around his waist.

He only takes a moment to wrap his arms around you in return.

That night you hold both of them as tightly as possible, making sure each of them gets a turn in the middle of the bed. Neither your husband nor your boyfriend would have put up with this when you first moved in together a few years ago. Now, you can tell how much it soothes them both, and you treasure the warm pride of it in your chest.

There’s no way you’ll let them keep your coffin outside long-term, but that’s a problem to solve another day.

Life gets there ahead of you. A week later, your boyfriend stalks into the flat brandishing an A4 sheet of paper.

“Look at this bullshit missive from our delightful landlord,” he says, slamming it onto the hallway table with a rattle. “‘Dear residents,’ as though it would kill him to use our actual names, and acknowledge that three men are living together and maybe even fucking.”

You and your husband share a glance, but neither of you interrupts. The two of you ran into your landlord in the supermarket a few days ago, and he wheeled his trolley around so fast to avoid having to greet you that it crashed into a display of tin cans.

“Apparently there have been ‘complaints’ from ‘multiple’ neighbours, although needless to say he won’t name names, because they probably don’t exist.” His jacket and boots discarded in the hall, your boyfriend drops himself into the armchair like a meteorite ramming home into the earth. “Anyone around here who had a problem would just say it to our faces, except for that fucking coward.”

“What are these alleged complaints about?” your husband prompts.

“He reckons that thing out there—” a jerk of the head towards the balcony doors— “is ‘morbid’, ‘inappropriate’, and ‘a violation of our tenancy agreement’. Which it’s not.”

“Well.” Your husband flicks his eyes towards you but then away again. “It’s not against our contract.”

Your boyfriend snorts. “Right.”

There’s a silence. You look down at the newspaper spread over your knees, unable to remember which article you were even reading.

“So what are we going to do about it?” your boyfriend asks at last. You can hear the real indecision in his voice: at any other time, he’d jump at the chance to fight back against misdirected authority, but this is different.

“There’s some space in the cellar,” your husband starts.

“Good,” you say firmly. “The old desk and chair in the spare room can go down there, and we can put my coffin where they are now.”

Your boyfriend helps you lump the old furniture down the narrow stairs and into your storage compartment in the cellar. Then he shuts himself in the kitchen and turns the stereo up almost loud enough to cover the crashing of pots and pans. You hoover up the dust left behind in the corners, and then your husband takes one end of the coffin, you take the other, and between you, you settle it into place.

“Not tonight, please,” your husband says, watching your face as you straighten the blanket, run a hand along the coffin wall to check for scratches in the finish. “He’s already—”

Already upset enough, he doesn’t say, which means he doesn’t have to admit that he’s upset, too. Neither of them understand why this is important to you, and you don’t have a way to explain to them what you don’t know yourself.

“Not tonight,” you agree, instead.

You’ve always had trouble sleeping: not drifting off, but staying asleep through the night.

Lying by yourself in an empty bed has been boring and terrifying by turns throughout your life. Sometimes you’ll have long stretches where your insomnia is mundane, uneventful; when you count sheep or relax your muscles from your toes to your head until you fall, impossibly to predict, back asleep. Inevitably, there comes the night when your eyelids twitch in the dark and a yawning sense of loss opens up all around you—loss and guilt and terror as if the whole world has collapsed down into nothingness, taking with it everything you loved, at your own careless hands.

When you met your husband, and again when you met your boyfriend, you thought that perhaps their presence would fix this about you. It didn’t. Most of the time, their sleeping bodies at your side do make it easier to calm down. If you ‘accidentally’ wake them up to join you, cuddles and sex are good ways to fill in that blank time too.

Sometimes, though, being around them makes the guilt hurt even more.

Now that your coffin is back inside, you can steal out of bed when you need to, and make your way through the unreal spaces of your flat into its shelter. You leave the lid away, less out of real caution than in case your husband comes to find you. The thought of him panicking on seeing the coffin sealed up is nauseating.

The hard sides around you help keep the feelings contained—keep you contained. You stare up at the shadowed ceiling, blink, and open your eyes to see it lit by the grey light of pre-dawn.

You’re feeling better, maybe even calm enough to sleep until the alarm in your real bed. Before you can get up, though, you notice the dark form of your boyfriend standing in the doorway.

When he comes closer, the light is just enough for the pair of you to meet each other’s eyes. He looks terrible, haunted in the same way that you felt when you came in here hours ago. It’s not surprising that he says nothing to you; what’s really unexpected is the way he falls to his knees at the side of your coffin and rests his forehead against it. You can’t remember him ever acknowledging it or you while you’ve been lying in it before.

Are his shoulders shaking? It’s hard to move, held by the lassitude the coffin induces in you even during the daytime. You can’t reach out a hand to comfort him.

After a while, your boyfriend stretches a hand inside the coffin to touch you himself. His fingers trail down your naked chest and brush your belly, raising the hairs in their wake with a prickle. When he gets to your boxer shorts, his touch gets more deliberate. You realise with a shudder that he’s stroking you through the fabric, and your body is responding.

It feels good. Still, you can’t help wondering just what is going on.

Coffins, even basic ones, are intended to be lined with satin or padding before their occupant is laid inside. The space saved because you skipped this step is just enough for your boyfriend to nudge your legs apart and kneel in between your calves, to pull out your stiffening cock and, leaning forwards, take it in his mouth. You hiss at the stimulation. The angle is bad—he can’t possibly be comfortable—but he’s working as hard at it as he ever does, brow creased in concentration, sucking you harder still. Under the soft, wet noises, you can hear how his fingers curl into the blanket, grinding against the coffin wood through the fabric.

You don’t get close to orgasm before he stops and sits up. He pushes down his pyjamas and tosses them out into the room, somewhere outside of the rectangular frame where you can’t see. Then, moving delicately, he’s stepping forwards above you, placing a knee either side of your ribcage where they just about fit, tucking his feet underneath your hips.

He’s all you can see, now, leaning over you as he positions himself for what he has planned. His lowered dark head and black t-shirt block out what ambient light there was and leave you in the dark, held in place by his weight. You can’t quite believe what’s happening even when he reaches back to take hold of you, to point you towards where he’s soft and wet—already prepared for this—and lowers his hips with a groan.

Your boyfriend rides you with gritted teeth and a deathgrip on the sides of the coffin. You can hear the wooden box shifting against the carpet and scraping against the wall beside you; you can feel the blanket rucking up underneath your back, and he must be scraping the hell out of his knees and heels where they’re jammed in around your body.

You’re so close together like this, and it still takes you far too long to realise what the hot droplets that keep splashing onto your chest, cooling as soon as they land, must be.

He takes you fiercely, frantically, and when you come it’s wrenched out of you, your body spasming uncontrollably before it’s just—done, finished. Your boyfriend’s hips rock unevenly to a halt on top of you, but he keeps gasping for air, sobbing himself hoarse as his tears drip off his face onto your skin.

“Are you all right?” you say, or attempt to say. Your mouth is too dry to get the words fully out.

He makes a choked little sound and slumps to one side, towards another dark shape that suddenly appears above you. It’s your husband, you realise, pulling your boyfriend tightly against his chest to comfort them both, while you soften and gradually slip out of his body.

“How long were you here?” you ask eventually, trusting your husband to know you’re talking to him.

“Since I woke up to find you’d gone wandering,” he says. The skin under his eyes is dark when he looks down at you. “I didn’t want to wake you up… no, that’s not true. I wanted to, but we agreed before, we weren’t going to wake you when you do this. In case it’s like sleepwalking. So I just kept you company.”

Your husband looks up again at your boyfriend, who’s only sniffling quietly now. He lets him go with a gentle pat on the back. “Then he came in, after a couple of hours.”

“Guess I got lonely by myself,” your boyfriend says. Somewhere under the snot and tears in his voice is a pale attempt at humour.

“You knew I do this?”

“Come back to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.”

He has to half-lift your boyfriend out from on top of you, his legs cramping and grazed, and it’s not much easier for you to stand up either, but you make it far enough to collapse into the sheets between the two men you love.

Your husband suggests driving the coffin to the tip and heaving it unceremoniously into the compactor.

Your boyfriend would like to set it on fire. Of course he would.

You remark that it might be possible to use it as a raised bed for gardening. Or break it down into its original pieces and store them in the cellar. Or ask if your sister’s housemates could use them for DIY. None of these suggestions are hits.

If it were only up to you, you’d keep it—not for everyday use, just for those times when you really need that obliterating peace and reassurance it gives you. After seeing what it’s done to your boyfriend and husband, though, you can’t keep seeking that peace at the expense of hurting them.

For now, you shut the door to the spare room and sit outside in the sun, where the spring flowers are blooming and the birds are singing, all three of you resting safely against one another.