The mower sputtered and coughed, a dying animal on its last breath. Anna turned it over with a faint grimace, her fingers tracing the blades caked in clumps of dirt and dead grass. “Joseph,” she called, her voice subdued but sharp, everything about her controlled except for the slight quiver of her chin. “It’s broken again.”

Joseph sat crouched on the crumpled stoop, his hunched shoulders silhouetted against the wavering light of a dull afternoon. He had been holding a cigarette, or rather the idea of one, for hours now—burnt out, forgotten, but positioned dutifully between his fingers.

“Of course it is,” he muttered. “Everything we touch breaks, doesn’t it?”

Anna let out a short, dry laugh. She knelt by the mower, shaking her head at how absurd life seemed to become in the tiniest moments. Even the stupid lawnmower was against them—with its sputtering motor and unreasonably awful taste for the grass it couldn’t cut. As if mocking their every attempt at normalcy.

“You know what? It’s—” She stopped, tasting the air like the words were something foreign on her tongue. “It’s almost… offensive how bad this machine is. Like it was intentionally designed to be, I don’t know, 难吃的.”

Joseph narrowed his eyes through the haze of his thoughts but didn’t immediately comment. He’d learned how Anna loved those odd Chinese phrases she picked up during summers teaching abroad. It wasn’t the words themselves—it was the way she tossed them around like some secret spice for meaning. “难吃的,” she had explained once, her voice laced with enthusiasm, “means disgusting. But more than that, it implies rebellion. A refusal to be consumed willingly. Like something tasting bad out of sheer shameless spite.”

The phrase lingered now, bitter and alive in the garden air, wrapping itself around the mower. Joseph chuckled low in his throat. “Maybe this mower doesn’t want to be used. Maybe it’s saying, ‘I reject you both and your pitiful, dying yard.’”

“That would be very on-brand, wouldn’t it?” Anna replied, softly smiling before the frown retook its place. She rubbed a streak of grease from her hands onto her jeans, her gaze falling into the distance, past the tired verdance of their uncut lawn. “I feel like we’re that lawn mower sometimes,” she murmured.

Joseph straightened. He never liked conversations that drifted toward metaphors of themselves. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Anna hesitated but relented. “Just… do you ever feel like life is resisting you? Every turn, every plan, everything breaking down, snapping or dying or betraying you, refusing to be consumed and used. Our lawn mower. The kitchen sink. This entire house. My stupid career that doesn’t even count as a career—”

“You’re spiraling,” Joseph cut in, his voice quieter than hers but somehow landing louder. “Everyone’s lawn mower breaks. It’s not a cosmic reflection of failure.”

Anna’s expression hardened as though his words insisted on bruising her. “It feels like it is,” she said simply.

Joseph didn’t answer right away. His gaze fell to the place where his cigarette had dropped—a faint ember glowing against the uneven cement. The shadows elongating across their aging lawn looked cold now, like frozen things that belonged to them more than the sun ever did.

Anna sat back on the damp earth. There was a strange gentleness to her exhale, as if the fight had ebbed out of her body. “Do you regret it?” she finally asked.

“Regret what?”

“Everything. Moving here. Us. The lawn mower.” Her chuckle didn’t quite hide the tremor beneath.

Joseph paused, watching the slight twitch in her fingers, the faint bite on her lip—the quiet rebellion against the calm she forced herself to maintain. “No,” he said, though it was clipped and unconvincing.

Anna nodded anyway, like she’d heard the truth despite the word. They sat in silence for some time, the mower sprawled between them like an artifact of some ongoing battle neither could name. The silence wasn’t sharp, but it wasn’t easy either. It was prickly, catching on forgotten words neither dared to retrieve.

At last, Joseph broke it. Barely. “Guess we should get it fixed.”

“Guess so,” Anna replied. She stood, brushing leaves and grease off her palms again, though the dirt never seemed to go anywhere. Her blue eyes flickered toward Joseph one final time, searching for resolution—or maybe just acknowledgment.

All he could do was hold her gaze for a fleeting moment before turning away. Just as the sun’s light began to fade, their house loomed darker and taller behind them. The certainty that neither of them would fix the mower, or the creeping cracks in their foundation, hung heavier than they cared to admit.

The mower remained there in the garden for weeks. It looked somehow alive.