by Rich Horton
Her fear confused Michael, as he loved her so much in that moment.
“It’s only me,” he said softly, though he removed his hand.
He watched her until she fell back asleep. His finger that had touched her there smelled like ocean water for the remainder of the night.
• • •
The election campaigning turned ugly. This was actually a relief. Violence erupted at Kloburcher’s rallies, and it was a relief to see people from both sides finally acting like they felt. Pepper spray in the eyes, sucker punches, a lunging dog, threats chanted through megaphones, thrown rocks, choke holds, a tackling to the pavement, riot gear, swear words, epithets, all of it filmed shakily on somebody’s cell phone. “What country is this? Is this the United States of America? Because I can’t recognize it,” said a commentator, sharing another smoke-filled protest video that resembled the kind of riots usually seen only in poorer nations.
All the videos looked the same. Everybody in them shouted. Everybody’s face was contorted in rage. People’s hands formed fists, and somebody was always panting and shaking the phone while running toward, or into, or away from, while the candidates went sneaking in through the back doors. It was Kloburcher sneaking along an overpass and through the back door. He wanted the protestors arrested. He demanded they be roughed up and thrown out and their tongues cut off, but then, he raved, they’d probably go around moaning, tongueless, into their bullhorns and their selfies. They would find some way to continue making an irritating noise. “Do what you need to do!” he ordered the crowds who came to celebrate him. “I’ll cover legal fees, okay?”
Mooney, meanwhile, walked through the main entrances of her venues. She walked along the line of protestors who shouted at her and threw things, objects, some of the objects sharp and homemade. A look of disgust on the protestors’ faces, or maybe it was fear. Not that people were afraid of her. She resembled somebody’s grandmother or she used to. It was what she stood for, what she and her body were suggesting. She was a ghost from a particular future in which people’s wives, and their mothers, changed form, and that was okay, while husbands sat on their hands and nodded, or maybe they were supposed to clap their hands with enthusiasm while, at the same time, embracing a constantly changing world. Mooney described that future as a desired one. She would not talk about the ugliness of it, which meant, to Michael, she was not being honest. She accused Kloburcher. She accused his supporters, pointing at them in the crowds, pointing and jabbing her elongated and gloved fingers. “You think you are living in one world and I am living in a totally different world. But guess what, there is only one world, and we’re living in it together.”
“I hope somebody shoots that woman in the mouth,” Michael said. He didn’t want Mooney’s version of the future either. His wife looked up. At least, he thought it was his wife. Was it his wife? That depended on what defined a person anyway. “Stop staring at me,” he said. He wanted his real wife to come back and thank him for bringing her back. He wanted Mooney to stop talking. The politician noted her security guards were unarmed. People accused her of longing to become a martyr. “Do you wish to become a martyr?” a reporter asked. Mooney replied, “I will not tolerate any politician who plans to tell me, or people like me, that I’m no longer human. What part of that do you not understand?”
• • •
When Michael arrived home from work, the first floor of the house was dark, though he could see a light on upstairs in his daughter’s bedroom. He set the carton of extra-large eggs and the gallon of milk and the boxes of macaroni on the kitchen island and he climbed the stairs.
His wife was in the glider. His daughter was in his wife’s lap, a fleece blanket patterned with fluffy clouds draped over the two of them. The girl was too big to sit like that now. Parts of her, the ends of her limbs, could no longer be contained by the glider’s frame or his wife’s body. A lamp filled a portion of the room with a warm, artificial glow. The other parts of the room were dim. “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” his daughter asked. His wife’s eyes remained closed. Her hand moved so it rested on the back of his daughter’s head. The gesture made her look like a mother, though she didn’t look like a mother anymore outside of that gesture. He imagined himself cracking open her stranger’s body, removing the excess tissue, or fluids, or whatever it was, until the mother and wife he had known and loved was revealed. He needed to figure out how to do this.
“Can I stop talking too?” asked the girl. His wife used to read to his daughter in that chair, all the fantastical classics, the books where children slip into other worlds and their parents never notice they’re gone. In such books, it wasn’t the parent who left. His wife, or whoever that was, opened her eyes and chose a book from the top shelf. She did not appear to put much thought into which book she chose. She placed the book into his daughter’s lap and tapped its cover. A book about a polar bear who became lost in the snow. His daughter began to read to herself. She was a good enough reader now that she didn’t have to read out loud, though her lips still formed the shapes of the words.
Michael’s son did not approach his mom to ask what was happening to her. The boy was older than his sister by several years, busy with soccer and rarely home, preferring most nights to have dinner at a friend’s house two blocks over.
• • •
Mooney was attacked at a rally. Her security guards did their best using their hands and their brute strength but, by that point, the attack had happened. A man wearing a baseball cap embroidered with a golden “K” punched Mooney in the side of her face with brass knuckles then used a knife to slit open her arm. “Alien! Alien! Alien!” the man shouted as he did this. He meant the extraterrestrial kind, which wasn’t accurate, as far as anybody knew. People had their phones out. The videos they took showed that Mooney did not raise her arms to shield her face, though she allowed a guard to cover her with his body. Another guard tackled the man to the sidewalk, slamming his head against the concrete, while Mooney supporters stomped on the tackled man’s fingers, breaking numerous bones, then another man wearing steel construction boots kicked him in the left side repeatedly. The attack looked similar to the other videos of violence occurring outside of the rallies. The difference here was Mooney on the ground, her skirt hiked up, bleeding, and her blood didn’t look normal, and she wouldn’t cover up her weird-looking blood. It was argued that she had, in fact, smeared her blood over the sidewalk with fluttering movements of her hands to make a greater impression.
Mooney’s campaign issued a statement: “What was done to me is of little relevance to my bid for governor. I believe, still, in equality, and respect, and protection, and acceptance, and an embrace of change, and an acknowledgment that who we are now as a society does not look the same as who we were a decade or even a year ago. I will still fight for these things. The difference being I will fight for them harder than before.”
Kloburcher issued a statement explaining his previous suggestions of violence were not actually invitations to violence. They had been more metaphorical: a metaphorical expression of the anger of his supporters, whose anger was understandable, as look at everything that had been taken from them. Kloburcher listed everything that had been taken from them. Crimes against the Wonderfuls, he noted, had increased three hundred percent during the past six months. Solutions other than breaking the bones of the attackers must be considered, he said. To get at the root of the problem rather than hacking off the branches. He reminded everybody that violence, or let’s call it force, can be a means of communication when nobody in power is listening to you.
• • •
At ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning, which happened to be Election Day, Michael and his wife met with Dr. Sabrina for what would be the last time. Sunlight entered the room through the kitchen window and made the countertops glare white. Am I not a man? Michael had begun to think. Am I not a person anymore? He said, “I will make you leave this house, and this family, unless we start having sex again
.”
“Whoa! Okay!” said Dr. Sabrina, holding up her hands. “So we have something to talk about now. We have a place to start. Let’s talk about your definition of sex. Define sex.”
“I think you know what my definition of sex is,” Michael said to his wife, who slumped beside him in yet another green dress. He was sick of seeing that color on her.
“Yet sex can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Correct?”
Michael said, “You can’t change the definitions of words like that.” His wife clutched a pad of Post-its in her lap. She looked into her lap. She had not written a word all day. “I don’t think I expect too much from you. You want to stop talking to me? You want to start drinking your meals through a straw? You want to sit around instead of taking care of the kids and the house? Fine. But part of being in love is that we are intimate in bed. I do expect that from my wife. I’m not forcing you,” he said to her very clearly, not wishing to be accused of anything vulgar or illegal. “Whatever you decide to do, you are making the choice. If you refuse to have sex with me, you are choosing to get divorced. If you choose to get divorced, you are no longer welcome in this house. Think seriously about how you will get by as a Hojacki, or whatever you want to call yourself, without my financial support.” Michael did not actually want to do any of these things. He did not want to take the children, or kick his wife out of his house, or withhold money from her. He hoped his threats would force this woman to start acting, again, like his wife. He loved his wife, only not this version of her.
“Michael, you do realize the changes Hojackis go through in certain areas of their bodies? You realize how they feel about intercourse, right?” asked Dr. Sabrina. “I am assuming you are equating sex with intercourse.”
“Likewise,” Michael said to his wife, “if you choose to have sex with me, then you are choosing not to get divorced. I am not ruining anybody’s life.”
Dr. Sabrina said, “You’re angry.”
“I am not some monster. This is what married couples do. They desire. They are desired. It’s normal. It’s a form of love.”
The therapy session eventually ended. Sabrina suggested they talk again tomorrow. In the meantime, she promised to send over a new handout with some fresh ideas. Michael closed the screen and told his wife that he still loved her, and he hoped she would make the right decision. Then he left for work, stopping on the way to vote at the local community center, where a line of voters twisted across the polished wooden floor marked for basketball games. Many people had an opinion about the election. Mooney was good, and Mooney was not good, and Kloburcher was good, and Kloburcher was not good. Not all these statements could be correct. The clump of women who waited in line behind Michael wore loose green dresses cinched around their waists with canvas belts. They wore buttons pinned to the collars of their dresses: It’s time to change. The argument being that someone, because they changed, or were changing, would make a better governor, or wife, or mother, or person. This was faulty logic, Michael knew. The extraordinary people were those who did not change. The people who said no! He waited behind two men who called Mooney childish names. Michael reveled in their shared humanness. The exit polls suggested it would be a close race. It didn’t feel that close.
• • •
They were lying in bed on election night with their heads set upon separate pillows. Michael had given up looking at his phone. None of the news outlets would call who won. His wife rolled over to face him and nodded, her new eyes wild and curious. Or else her eyes were faraway and frantic. He had trouble reading her expressions. But it was a real nod. He did not make this up.
“I really appreciate this,” he said, reaching to rub her shoulders and her stomach. She tensed when his fingertips moved to touch the delicate skin around her abdomen. He said, “I appreciate you. I love you. I’ve always loved you. I never stopped. Give me a few minutes.”
Downstairs he took hold of the bag of tea lights leftover from the Halloween pumpkins. He placed two candles in each bedroom window and lit them with a lighter neither of them used for cigarettes anymore. The room flickered. She blew every candle out. Michael removed his sweater, his T-shirt, his belt, his pants, his underwear, and his socks. He took off her green dress, her bra, and her underwear. She did not allow him to remove her socks. “It’s totally okay to keep your socks on,” he said. He believed his real wife was about to come back to him, at least a part of his real wife. He believed she wanted to come back and that she was able to.
His wife appeared to be fine at first. She seemed to be rocking silently along with him as he rubbed against her. He asked if she was okay as they rocked. “Are you okay? Is this okay?” he asked. She didn’t shake her head to say no or stop. It’s not as if a different version of her life existed that would take her in as she was. He leaned back and spread her legs apart then hesitated, unsure if it was technically possible to enter his wife. That hole he saw had looked so small! But also expandable. It was worth trying. In his head, he had already tried.
He had been looking at other parts of her body as well as he could in the dark. Now he looked down at her face. She must have been biting hard on her tongue all this time. A bit of silver blood was gathering in the corner of her mouth. He brought his fingers to her mouth, intending to wipe away the blood. “Are you—?” he asked. She flexed her knee, her left knee, and she kicked him. He fell backward onto the mattress. “Honey?” he said. He got back on top of her. She did not kick him a second time. Had she wanted him to stop, she would have kicked him again, Michael knew.
That hole in her appeared to be stretchable enough. She wasn’t bone-dry down there either, he noted with satisfaction. Still, it was difficult at first. Then it wasn’t. “I love you,” he said, and really he meant this. He said it again, confident this was the best love he had ever offered anyone, a love he could only feel here, in a private place inside of the woman who was his wife. He held his wife, his real wife, in position on the bed on her back so she would stay in this special place with him. Her eyes were closed. “Lisa,” he said, wanting her to open her eyes.
She did not open her eyes. Instead, an abrasive noise, a squeal—like a stuck animal!—eased out from behind her closed lips. He rubbed her arms, her hair, trying to quiet her. “Shhh,” he whispered. Her noises increased in intensity. She was going to wake the kids if she kept that up. He rested his hand over her mouth. Every place they touched, those places were shining. She must have seen that too. After a certain point, her squealing stopped, or he couldn’t hear her anymore. Who wouldn’t want to shine like this? His hips shined against her hips, her mouth shined against his hand. Then the light between them became a sound and he pushed that sound far inside of her.
Afterward, she rolled onto her side to face the window, which earlier in the evening Michael had closed and locked. The blinds were pulled. No one could see inside their room. Michael curled around his wife and held on to her from behind. She deepened her breathing and he assumed she fell asleep. He let go of her and put on his clothes and left the house for a night walk. There were streetlamps in their neighborhood up to a point a mile out, when it was like somebody gave up on the lights. At an empty intersection, he checked his phone. The news reports were useless. Kloburcher! said Fox. Mooney! said the Times. The night was clear and cold, and Michael was underdressed. His fingers grew numb. At the same time, he felt an expansive heat, a certainty in the pit of his body, which kept him comfortable. All the stars appeared to be out, covering the sky with a light that didn’t matter. The only constellation Michael recognized was Orion because of the hunter’s tidy three-star belt. The other constellations had never made any sense to him. It was like somebody a long time ago thought they could gaze up into the stars and see whatever they wanted to see, the gods, the winged horses, the chained women, and they thought what they saw was so important that they believed everybody was going to see the same things forever as well.
Back home, he removed his shoes at the front door and cre
pt into the bedroom he and his wife shared, listening for her damp, familiar breathing. Instead of his sleeping wife, he found a woman, or something, an individual sitting upright and naked on the edge of their bed. The blinds had been pulled up. Anyone could have looked in. Her—its?—body was illuminated by the porch light outside. Michael didn’t recognize its features. Its blank back that did not show the curve of any bones. The strands of colorless hair that had fallen out of a clip. It seemed an inappropriate dream, considering what had recently taken place in that bed.
He looked again, wishing he could recognize his wife.
He saw his wife, naked, her legs crossed at the ankle.
A trick of the porch light.
She had laid out several photographs on top of his pillow. “I thought you were sleeping,” he said. “You should be sleeping.” At first, he thought they were closeup photos of a butterfly’s chrysalis stage taken at an unusual angle. He looked closer. The cocoons were enormous, and each one had been set upon a bed. Inside each cocoon was the outline of a woman, scrunched, head to her knees. The last picture showed an appendage, an arm?—no, it was too odd to call an arm—working its way out.
His wife wrote something down on a yellow Post-it. Michael did not read what she wrote.
He gathered up the photographs, and crumpled them, and threw them into the garbage. “I don’t want to look at shit like that anymore.”
She wrote something else down.
“I want to look at you.”
She wrote something else.
She wrote something else again.
His pillow was filling up with Post-its.
“I love you so much right now,” he said. “Are you listening to me?”
She wrote again. He took away her pen, and she moved to the window on her side of the room. The kids had abandoned their bikes in the driveway though snow was predicted overnight, an early blizzard. For the moment, the ground was bare and sterile. There was nothing magical about the scene. Michael stood on the other side of the bed looking out of the same window though from a different angle so he couldn’t see the bikes. People’s lives didn’t need to be magical to be worthwhile, he wanted to say. We are enough as we are. You were enough for me. He would tell her this tomorrow. “Come on, let’s go to bed,” Michael said, brushing the Post-its from his pillow. They fluttered to the floor. His wife lay on her side of the mattress. She faced the window. He lay beside her on his back. When they woke the next morning, the world was buried.