“They listened to the news in the front room, their bodies as still as the mounted deer on the wall behind them.” In Idra Novey’s short story “Husband and Wife During the Nightly News,” a married couple go through their routine of watching the news, the husband commentating while expecting the wife to murmur in agreement, a sequence they stick to “as if the very beams of their house depended on it.” The setting of the living room adds meaning onto the ritual of their marriage, and still objects begin to take life, ending with the wife feeling as if she had “ripped off the doe’s furred skin with her teeth.” Write a story that features a character whose living area directly reflects the conflicts being faced. How can inanimate objects be used to express emotions?
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