At first the thriftstore couch contented itself with their heedless little feedings, the stray change or the odd half-popped kernel. After the down payment on the house, little was left in the couple’s budget for furnishings. They made a game of it; they were broke but the laughs came easy, and hungers kept to their ordinary bounds.

But in the rank and waxing silence, in the ever more incessant flicker of the widescreen light, in the blind spot under their very unwitting asses, the overstuffed hulk burgeoned: spreading loose at the joints, growing broad and mottled from fodder of lazy binging evenings.

Until many years later, from the left arm one of them looked over at the other—across the flabby plaid expanse: the subducted copies of Town and Country, the forgotten heart-shaped holiday trinkets, the swallowed shoelaces—and thought: 

And where are our children, then?