The last yogurt is missing from the fridge. After a few minutes of rummaging through the shelves, I decide to look in the trash, and there it is; a plastic container lies amidst garbage, the inside scraped clean. I take a few deep breaths and walk into the living room, marching straight up to the couch. Maya is there, curled up against a cushion, long fingers busy crocheting a scarf. Without a word I hold up the yogurt cup, apple peel stuck on the side and smelling vinegary from its time in the trash can. Her shoulders tense momentarily, but her face remains nonchalant. 

“You really dug through the trash for that?” she asks. 

“Don’t give me that,” I say. “Why did you eat it?”

Maya finishes one row of her scarf and starts the next. “I was hungry,” she says, like it was obvious. “Work was rough today, alright? I needed the blood sugar boost.”

But she won’t meet my eyes. 

I drop the cup on the sofa; it rolls up against her foot and she kicks it away, her expression growing dark. “Seriously, Mark? That’s so gross.”

 “I don’t get it,” I say. “What are you trying to achieve here? I can tolerate a lot, but this—we agreed on this. You don’t take food from the top shelf.”

“Is that a rule? Do you have a rulebook somewhere with those words written down?”

“It’s something that we decided together, once. When you had respect for my boundaries.”

Maya sits up straighter, puts her needles down. Now she fixes me with a cool gaze, pushing her dark hair to the side. “You’re being petty, Mark.”

And it’s infuriating, because I agree. It does sound like I’m being petty. I’m getting worked up over a single yogurt that I could replace from the grocery store in a few minutes. But none of that realization is reflected in the anger of my voice. It’s more than just the yogurt.

“I’m being petty? You’ve ignored every text I’ve sent for the past week. You’ve been asking your coworker for a ride home every day. I waited outside your building for an hour before the guard told me you’d already left!”

“I apologized.”

“A shrug and saying that you were tired is not an apology.”

“Tell that to yourself sometime.”

I bite back what I’m about to say, because I know I’ll regret the words. It’s too easy to say horrible things when you don’t mean them, and the regret doesn’t come until afterwards. I’ve lost people that I’ve cared less about than Maya that way. 

She could really drive me up the wall at times. But no matter what, I know that I want Maya to love me. 

It’s been difficult these past few weeks. Not just for me but for her. Her friend has been in the hospital for a bit, and there’s a bleak edge to her words that seems to deepen with every passing day. She’s good at hiding her distress with a mask of indifference, but her actions speak otherwise. I realize that she’s just trying to ask for help, in the most Maya way possible. The blunter she was on the outside, the worse she felt on the inside.

So I just had to reveal her soft side.

We’re face-to-face with one another now, her defiant gaze raking over me. I realize that I have no words to give; none that would help, anyways. So I choose a different route. Instead I move closer to her, and she flinches slightly, as if expecting the worst. Instead I wrap her in a tight hug. 

Maya struggles for a moment, then stops. I feel her chest rise and fall rapidly against mine. After a moment her arms come up to awkwardly hold me, her fingers barely touching my back.

“What gives, Mark?” she mumbles against my shoulder. “I stole your stupid yogurt, after all.”

“You did. And I’m not forgiving you for that. But you wouldn’t do something like this unless there was something really bad going on.” I give one more squeeze and release her; she tumbles down to the sofa and lies there, blinking up at me. 

“If you want a yogurt, we’ll go buy some, okay?” I say. “Later. For now, just tell me what’s going on.”

---

Start a new story in which, in the first paragraph, a married character breaks a rule of his or her marriage. But don’t make this character a bad character and the spouse a good character. Make both characters have positive and negative qualities. Make both characters sympathetic in some ways and unsympathetic in others (i.e., make them complex). [750 words]

This one’s okay. I liked using the missing yogurt as a way to initiate the rest of the scene, but the dialogue in the argument feels too shallow. I didn’t really have a direction for the characters and so the ending just… fizzles out? I don’t feel particularly compelled to explore them outside of this exercise. (Rule of Thumb: complexity is just writing someone as an asshole but then but then revealing that they’re an asshole for reasons!!!)¹

Notes

¹ i mean this is kinda true but not really