The Chair
My friends told me about the downtown chair store. That’s where your new life begins, they said—go before it closes for the day. Don’t let another sun set before you find a fine new chair. So there I was in the showroom, for that’s what the chair store is. Name a chair: the chair store has it. Imagine, as hard as you can, the chair no one has thought of. It’s harder than you think. A poster on the chair store wall says IMAGINE A CHAIR. But the poster doesn’t show a picture of a chair. The poster is a mirror. You look at yourself and think, Me? A chair? But it’s not so easy. Not anyone or anything can be a chair. There are rules. I thought up some incredible chairs, all shapes and makes. I dreamed up seats and backs, arms and straps, legs and slats, but again and again I’d turn a corner and find the chair. The store had access, it seemed, to my deepest dreams of chairs.
The man behind the counter studied a magazine. He stood, as if holding himself apart from the hazards of temptation. He worked at a chair store, but he was his own man too, commanding his impulses. The magazine wasn’t meant for the public but for the people who run chair stores. I wanted to look at the magazine, but I don’t run a chair store, not yet. The man was trying to keep the store at the cutting edge. Imagine if a new chair came out and completely blindsided him and his store. I looked at the poster again, IMAGINE A CHAIR. I walked around and around all kinds of chairs. I found one I liked and reached out to touch it.
“That’s a very good choice,” the man said, turning the page of his magazine. I didn’t ask why, in the world of chairs, you choose by touch. “Do you know what kind of chair that is?” the man asked. “Of wood,” I wanted to say, “wooden,” but the power of speech had left me. “Do you know who made it?” I shook my head. The only power was the power of the chair. “That chair was made,” the man continued, “by the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. Do you know what they believed in?” I shook my head again, even though it sounded clear enough. “They believed in perfection,” the man said. “Do you know what their chairs are like?” He turned another page of the magazine, and I couldn’t say a word. It was as if the page covered my mouth, smothered my speech. My throat closed, like a leg had lodged in my windpipe. I pointed to the chair: maybe their chairs are like this chair. The man closed his eyes, nodded. “That’s right, that’s exactly what their chairs are like. All their furniture, but especially the chair, is defined by an honesty utter and total. The honest is the perfect. A chair that would never lie to you. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing believed if they made a chair honest enough, perfect enough, an angel might come down and sit. Do you know how honest a chair must be to attract an angel?” he asked. I didn’t know, but I didn’t think he really knew either. “Have you ever known an angel to love a lie?” he asked.
How many angels had he known? He put down the magazine. He came over and stood beside me. Together we looked at the chair—firm and solid, so resolutely itself. I didn’t want to look at the poster again, but that’s exactly what I did: IMAGINE A CHAIR. I met the man’s gaze in the mirror, the pair of us reflected, two non-chairs inspecting themselves. “Very few people,” he said, “come in and stand before this chair and look at it the way you are. I look into their eyes and see beautiful greed, or wooden wonder, or splinters of bitterness. That’s what it can be like to look at perfection and truth. But in your eyes I see—would you mind if I called it pity? The pity of heaven, the pity of the perfect? As if you feel bad for the chair.” “But I don’t,” I said, as I found my voice. It creaked like a wicker seat. The truth was I felt bad for myself. I thought of the dishonesty at the heart of my apartment. All my soft and rotten furniture. My lying couch and bed. My tricky cups and dishes. My two-faced bike and car. All my life’s possessions that would drive away the angels. “Now the question we have to ask ourselves is,” the chair man said, lowering his voice, “are you that angel?” He asked on behalf of himself and of the chair, of all the chairs, even those that hadn’t yet been brought into the world. “Are you the angel of that chair?”
I wondered what kind of man would say yes, it is I, the angel of the honest chair. But I’m not the kind of man who has felt that way, or who knows what an angel wants or feels, or what a feeling says or means. Prove you are an angel, the chair says. “I’d like to know my options,” I said. “What do you mean?” the man asked, frowning. “What I mean is”—and here I looked out over the vast array of chairs next to chairs, chairs upon chairs, chairs for days, months, years, and for a flickering moment I saw the chairs that hadn’t happened yet, the chairs to come, so many that my eyes couldn’t fix on just one, the rows upon rows of the seats of the future—“what I mean is, for an angel, is the perfect chair my only option?” Now I pointed at a different chair. It was green. Completely ugly and devious. Overstuffed with falsehood and ego. A chair trying to be something it wasn’t. A chair that didn’t know itself at all. A chair no mother could love. But Christ could love it, and Christ would try, when the prince of peace appeared again. And maybe I would too. “Doesn’t every chair need an angel?” I asked. And now I touched the green chair. It was awful, it was wonderful, it was mine. “What I mean is, isn’t it possible that I could be—that I am—the angel of a lesser chair?”
Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the acquiring editor of Dalkey Archive Press. His stories and criticism have been published or are forthcoming in Cleveland Review of Books, Triple Canopy, The Nation, The Baffler, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. His debut play, The Town, was staged at Vino Theater in May 2026 and at Spectacle Theater July 2026. He is at work on a new play, a Freudian western, about dueling lawyers and weaponized therapy.