The Conversation

Written for Muse On Monday. David has
asked us to write a story about household
chores. Here’s where the prompt took me.

The water was the perfect temperature …. warm enough to be comfortable, cool enough to keep her from drifting off entirely. Sarah moved the sponge in slow circles across the rim of a dessert plate, her eyes tracing the white curl of a wave as it climbed and collapsed against the shore. The afternoon light was doing something extraordinary to the ocean.

She had opened the window above the sink mostly for the breeze, and partly for the sound …. that rhythmic, unhurried breathing of the ocean that made even the dishes feel like a meditation rather than a chore.

She was on her second plate when she heard them.

“….can’t keep putting it off, Ross. It has to be this weekend.”

That was Greg’s voice, their neighbor of six summers, the man who came to their Fourth of July barbecue every year and always brought an expensive bottle of wine and a slightly inappropriate joke. His yard was separated from theirs by a low wooden fence draped in beach roses, and on quiet afternoons sound carried between the two properties with uncomfortable intimacy.

She almost tuned him out. She almost let it blur into the sound of the surf.

Then she heard Ross.

Her husband’s voice …. lower than usual, more deliberate, the voice he used in business calls, not the voice he used with her. “I know. I’ve been thinking about it all week. The timing is right. We’re not going to get another chance like this.”

Beth set the plate down carefully in the drying rack.

“Does she suspect anything?” Greg asked.

A pause. A long one.

“No,” Ross said. “She has no idea.”

The sponge slipped out of her hand and into the soapy water. She didn’t reach for it. She stood very still, her wet hands gripping the edge of the sink, her eyes no longer seeing the ocean at all.

She.

Which she? The question arranged itself in her mind with a terrible, geometric clarity. Her? Or Diane …. Greg’s wife, her best friend since the second summer here, the woman with whom she had shared a thousand glasses of wine on that deck not thirty feet from where she was standing right now, the woman who called her every other morning just to talk?

Does she suspect anything?

“We’ll need to make it look natural,” Greg said. “That’s the part I keep getting stuck on. It needs to be clean, Ross. No loose ends.”

Sarah’s vision had narrowed to a small, bright point. She was aware, distantly, that her hands were shaking.

Her phone rang. Loudly.

The sound exploded through the kitchen …. her ringtone, something bright and cheerful she’d chosen last spring …. and she actually gasped. She slapped her wet hand against the counter to find it, nearly knocking it to the floor, and outside the voices stopped mid-sentence like a radio switched off.

Silence.

Then, through the open window, she heard footsteps in the dry beach grass. Slow, deliberate footsteps, moving toward the house.

Toward her side of the fence.

Her phone kept ringing. She looked down at the screen.

Diane calling.

She stared at it for one long, suspended moment …. Diane’s name glowing up at her, innocent and urgent …. while the footsteps grew closer, and she understood with cold certainty that she had about four seconds to decide whether to answer it or not. Whatever decision she made in those next four seconds would determine what happened to both of them.

She answered.

“Diane,” she said, and her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “Hey. Yes. Actually….” she turned from the window and walked deeper into the kitchen, lowering herself behind the breakfast bar, her back against the cabinets. “….I was just thinking about you.”

Outside, the footsteps stopped at the fence.

She could feel whoever it was standing there …. could feel it the way you feel someone standing in a dark room …. just on the other side of the wall.

“Can you come over?” Diane was saying. “I need to talk to you about something. It’s about Greg. I think something is wrong, Sarah. I think….”

A shadow crossed the window above the sink.

Sarah pressed herself flatter against the cabinets, her heart slamming, and watched the shadow pause and linger at the open window …. a shape, a silhouette, just a darkness against the afternoon gold.

Then it moved on.

“Sarah? Are you still there?”

She closed her eyes. Breathed.

“I’m here,” she said quietly. “I’m here, and I’m listening. But Diane …. don’t come over. I’m coming to you. Lock your front door right now.” A beat. “And don’t open it for anyone except me.”

NAR©2026

This is “Girls Talk” by Dave Edmunds

Muse on Monday – May 4, 2026

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}