The Flight Instinct
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Aaron and Zuleika had not gone to Home Depot intending to buy a magic carpet, nor in fact any carpet at all.  They were shopping for a vanity to replace the piddly little medicine cabinet with the rust-stained shelves that was, Zuleika told him, a serious threat to their fledgling marriage.  She claimed that as she had consented to bind herself for life to a man who owned twice as many hair products as she did despite having less than a tenth the actual hair (even if you counted the few embarrassed tufts on his chest), the least he could do was provide adequate bathroom storage.

So they had driven to the Home Depot on Jefferson that Saturday morning instead of lying in bed naked reading the New York Times aloud to each other (which would not have happened anyway, as they did not subscribe and could think of better things to do naked, but was nonetheless something they often discussed, as the practice seemed to epitomize the sort of smug yuppie intellectualism to which it was generally assumed they aspired).  And right there in the parking lot was a safety-cone orange pavilion large enough for a respectable circus sideshow, draped with banners reading Area Rugs at Blowout Prices!!  Runners * Round * Oversize, and neither of them had ever been much good at not venturing into large, brightly colored tents. 
And they’d been thinking about getting a rug for the living room anyway, because hardwood floors were all well and good until you wanted to lie on them and make your spouse give you a proper backrub while the two of you watched Discovery Channel shows about people who were professionally stupid around dangerous animals.

Most of the rugs piled by the dozen on cheap plywood tables were more or less dreadful: machine-made, plastic-backed, overly geometric junk in strident colors that wouldn’t have sold for $29.99 and three umlauts at Ikea.  But Aaron had a weakness for browsing, and in the dim corner across from the uninterested cashier lay a stack of more organic designs – large, imperfect flowers and the silhouettes of arcane animals.  They were not masterworks.  They’d probably been woven by teenage girls with no real idea what they were doing, but this lent them a sort of childish appeal.  And most of the time Aaron didn’t feel like he knew what he was doing either, not in his two-month-old marriage to a woman he still didn’t believe he might actually be able to keep and not in his job as a Program Coordinator at Northrop Grumman, a position in which he mainly seemed to spend his time moving pieces of paper from one stack to another and writing reports on other people’s reports.

“I like this one,” he told Zuleika, gesturing with his chin toward a rug near the bottom of the pile as he held the others up off of it with both hands.  The rug in question was perhaps four feet by seven, done mostly in dusky reds and midnight blues.  It would clash utterly with their sage couch cushions.  But she just cocked her head and told him, “You can have it if I get to choose the vanity,” and he was too busy being grateful she hadn’t taken issue with his rather questionable taste to worry about whether he really wanted to pay over three hundred dollars (after tax) for a carpet he’d never quite meant to buy in the first place. 

He put it on his Discover card, like all of his less prudent purchases, because they seemed marginally less imprudent if he knew he would be getting a one percent cashback bonus which he could then turn into handy gift cards and lose in the mysterious corners of his desk drawers. 

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