Househusbands and Happenstance
a short story
This is fiction—just a bit of fun. The narrator is a "what if" version of me: darker, sharper, someone who leaned into every bad impulse instead of resisting them.
I know careful reading is rare, so I fully expect someone to cancel their subscription in horror at my fictional crime spree.
Ah, well.
If y’all like this, there might be more for paid subs. Now that my depression has lifted, creativity’s back, and this was a fun way to let the spark catch fire.
Becoming the dark overlady of New England wasn’t something I did on purpose.
It also… wasn’t particularly difficult.
I got most of it done in seven and a half months, and it was fully accomplished in just under a year. By month three, it was making me money, and by not-quite-six-months in, I could’ve quit my job.
I didn’t, because I love my job. And I meant what I said—I didn’t do this on purpose, so why would I quit my job to do it full-time?
Back then, I was still renting, my apartment taking up most of the top floor of an old Vermont farmhouse. The floors creaked like they had stories to tell, and in the winter, the walls breathed cold drafts no matter how high I cranked the heat. My bedroom window overlooked a rolling field that turned silver with frost by mid-October and stayed that way until April. Vermont winters are long, and even inside, you can never quite forget the weight of all that snow pressing in from outside.
It started with Luca, the teenage neighbor who was my househusband-for-pay. He carried grocery bags up the narrow, uneven stairs, rearranged furniture when I got the urge for a change, cooked my HelloFresh meals when I was on a deadline, and did my laundry at his parents’ house, returning it warm and folded, scented with whatever detergent his mom used. He made the weekly trips to the recycling center and wore a Santa hat from Thanksgiving to mid-December, taking all my Christmas presents for far-flung friends to the one-man post office at the end of the dirt road where I lived.
Luca handled all the chores I would’ve delegated to an actual husband, if I’d had one, and it was a job he did very well.
His parents were good people, determined to raise an adult man, not a phone-addicted little boy like so many of his peers. At sixteen, he could shop, cook, do laundry, and handle all basic household repairs—and when something came up he couldn’t handle, his dad would teach him at home and send him back to me prepared to get it done.
The official reason I needed Luca was that my shoulder hurts like hell. The real reason? I was lonely. And quite sad.
His company, plus being spared from the mundane parts of life that swallow fifteen hours a week if you’re a Vermonter living alone, made everything inexplicably better.
Vermont, where “convenient” means thirty minutes away.
Luca was a great kid. Honest, hardworking, and more conscientious than most men twice his age. The kind of kid who didn’t just shovel my car out but salted a path from my door to the driver’s side, making sure I wouldn’t slip on the ice. When the wind howled through the gaps in the old window frames, he was the one who taped them shut with plastic insulation kits. The first time he did it, he scowled at the half-broken latches. “You should really make the landlord fix these,” he said. I laughed. We both knew that wasn’t going to happen.
It was a great job for him—better money than his friends could make cutting grass, shoveling snow, or waiting tables. I overpaid him deliberately, both to ensure he’d prioritize pleasing me and so he could be the undisputed alpha dog among his friends, the one with cash to burn.
Having Luca do everything I didn’t want to do spoiled me.
He was so grateful to have the job that he was functionally on-call, though I stressed that I knew he had a life. Parents. Friends. Unless I said, “I really need this today,” I never expected him to drop everything. It was the only thing I ever said that Luca ignored.
Until he made the ski team.
That’s what changed everything, really.
Suddenly, Luca was much busier. So I started using Instacart for the endless running-around-getting-shit-for-me. And that, in ways I couldn’t yet see, set everything else in motion.