Home Improvement
by Stephen Tuttle
The time had come to replace our windows, so we called a window company, and they sent a salesperson who confirmed that our windows were old and shabby. You need new windows, she said. We know, we said, that’s why we called you. Have you considered mirrors? she said. Our mirrors are fine, we said. But not your windows, she said. No, we said, our windows are shabby. You just said so yourself. So, let’s get you some mirrors, she said. No, we said, just windows. Right, she said. Later that day, all our windows had been replaced by mirrors. This made us angry at first because they weren’t even two-way mirrors, the sort that let some light in. To the salesperson, we said, What good are mirrors that don’t let light in? But she didn’t hear us. She was admiring herself in a mirror that was leaning against the house where a window used to be. This one is very nice, she said. We agreed that that one was very nice. We asked when it would be installed, and she told us that it was installed. No, we said, installed-installed and not just leaning against the house like that. Look at this frame, she said. The frame was gold and beautiful but maybe a little ornate for our tastes. The mirror itself was so large that it was never going to fit. We were about to say so when the salesperson invited us to stand where she was standing and look at the mirror from there. So we each took a turn in front of the mirror, feeling flattered by what we saw there.
Stephen Tuttle’s fiction and prose poetry has appeared in The Nation, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He teaches courses in fiction writing and American literature at Brigham Young University and is currently at work on a book-length collection of microfictions.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Home Improvement”? It emerges from a process I’ve been enjoying for the last couple of years. I’ll use a random word generator to create juxtapositions that spark ideas (this one might have been “mirror” and “house,” for example). I try out a lot of these, seeing what sticks and throwing out the rest (the majority). Sometimes, though, I land on something that feels genuinely surprising to me and “Home Improvement” is one of those.
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