THYROID
by Chris Blexrud
This piece is inspired by and loosely alludes to Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love.”
The doctor slid the translucent film into an illuminated frame on the wall and pointed to an area on the X-ray, a dark blotch just above the center of the neck or a bit below the chin. Colin scrutinized the spot. It didn’t look like anything to him, or it just looked like bones, the way bones appear in an X-ray: translucent, white, and blurry. As if sensing the man’s incredulity, the doctor tapped the dark patch again, tracing the area with his finger. Colin turned to his wife and looked at her body for the spot the doctor was talking about. Embarrassed, Virginia pulled her sweater tight around her neck. Then they both turned and attempted to pay attention to what the man was saying. According to the doctor, something was afoot in her neck.
The doctor flipped a switch and the wall behind him went black. The image was gone, and the small exam room suddenly felt smaller. He turned next to a cabinet and pulled out a medical diagram. He unfurled it in front of them and held it by the top. It was a large poster, almost four feet long, and its edges still curled up at the bottom a bit. With his free hand, the doctor reached in front of the image to point again. His finger landed on the chin of the female figure in the diagram. He looked down over the top of the poster to make sure his finger was in the right place and shifted his hand about an inch down to the woman’s neck.
She seemed unconcerned with his touch. Her lips were flat, balancing a small smile, and her eyes stared straight ahead. Virginia liked her cool demeanor and haircut. She thought it looked sporty, the way her short red bangs parted to the left. She started to imagine the rich and vibrant life of this woman, but was interrupted by the doctor’s talking. He circled the area on the diagram with his finger. He said how this organ in her throat was the thyroid, and how it was very important for her body and her health.
Colin thought this thing, this thyroid, looked like a pair of chicken lungs, and a memory came back to him. As a kid growing up on a farm, the chickens used to be his responsibility. He had to let them out in the morning, collect their eggs, feed them, and then coop them back up at night. On a cold morning when he was eight, one of the field hands got his attention. He asked the boy if he knew what a chicken looked like inside. Of course he did, his father had him kill one year ago. “No,” the man said, “what’s really inside.” He led Colin out behind the silo where a coyote had gotten to one of the birds. He had only eaten part of it before getting scared off, so it was just lying there missing its head and a wing.
The field hand picked up the body that was stiff with the cold and lifted it up to Colin’s face. Then the man cut into it with the big knife he kept in his boot. Not bothering to defeather the bird as the boy had been taught to do, the man broke open the breast with his hands and started digging around inside. Colin watched as he pulled out one organ after another, naming them as if this were some kind of lesson. He remembered how the man put the chicken lungs flat against his palm and gently brushed them apart with his grimy fingers. In all that blood, they glided open. They were just two pink triangles connected by a thread. They seemed too small, even for a chicken, and their bumpy texture reminded him of the felt shapes he played with in school.
Afterward, Colin watched as the man dumped the organs on the ground and wiped the blade on his jeans. He drew the knife hard across his thigh, smearing the denim almost black with blood before slipping it back into his boot. Then the man cleaned his hands on the grass, and someone hollered for him, so he ran off. He just left Colin there with a pile of guts and the bloody grass and the feathers. Colin thought he should tell someone about what happened, but he never did. That farm hand wasn’t around for much longer anyway. He got in trouble for something or other that summer, and Colin never saw him again. But he remembered the man, and whenever he would return to that spot behind the silo he always seemed to find a few feathers.
Yep, Colin thought, the thyroid looked just like chicken lungs, except they were turned upside down in the human body. The man in the white coat explained that it was not uncommon for people in middle age to develop thyroid problems and that Virginia possibly had Hashimoto’s Disease, but he would have to run more tests to be sure. After that there was a long moment of silence until Virginia poked her husband in the side, urging him to say something. Colin came to and asked the doctor if it was dangerous and if there was a cure. The doctor laughed in a warm but slightly condescending way. No, it wasn’t dangerous or fatal, but it couldn’t be cured per se. It was easy enough to manage, though.
Virginia just needed to sleep and eat well, and she would be just fine, provided she took whatever drugs they were going to prescribe her. The doctor explained that, so long as it was properly managed, she wouldn’t have any major symptoms. She might feel tired, moody, or hormonal, or she might gain or lose weight. She might even act strangely from time to time. Colin thought that wasn’t any different than how she was normally. The doctor then asked if they were planning on getting pregnant. “They,” Colin laughed to himself. Virginia shook her head.
The doctor nodded. “Good… well, not good. You know what I mean.” This condition would make it harder for Virginia to have a baby, but it was by no means impossible. Medical science could do a lot to help the process. Virginia smiled and thanked him. The doctor offered to answer any more questions, but neither of them had any. He said he would be in touch after he got more test results back. Then he showed them to the door and stuffed a prescription in her hand on the way out.
Colin offered to drive on the way home, which Virginia thought was a nice gesture. He smiled at his wife as they pulled onto the freeway, and she smiled back at him, but they said next to nothing. It was a long drive home to the country, and Colin could sense that his wife was upset. She usually was very chatty in the car, especially when she was the passenger. He leaned over and put his hand on her thigh. “Come on,” he said, “it’s good news if you think about it.” She looked at him gravely. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. Virginia nodded and forced a smile. “Don’t be like that. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. He waited a moment.
“Is it about the baby?” he asked.
“No, it’s not about the baby,” she said.
“Well, do you feel alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good,” he said, but he knew something was bothering her. Colin expected he could get it out of her later, maybe after dinner or over some wine. But for the time being, they drove just listening to the radio.
When they got back it was late but still bright out. The high summer sun hung above the tree line, and the woods cast long shadows that reached the porch of their house. Colin parked the car, and Virginia hopped out and went inside. But Colin took his time. He stood on the porch for a bit, and he watched the shifting light and growing shadows, noting how different they looked from one moment to the next. In short order, the shadows spread to the spot where Colin was standing. They climbed up his old boots and passed him on the way to the welcome mat with the faded letters. Just as they threatened to overtake the front door, he went inside. By then Virginia had already set about making dinner. Colin asked if she needed any help, but she just shooed him out of the kitchen. He sat in the living room, drinking beer and watching television.
Later, when they sat down to dinner, they talked like they always did. Colin made his jokes, and Virginia brought up the people in their lives. To Colin it was gossip, but Virginia said that it wasn’t gossip unless it was bad. If it was positive, it was just news. She had a point. After they finished, they sat and had a drink together. The whole dinner Colin had waited for the right opening to interrogate his wife about how she felt, or he had been hoping she would do it for him. But just as he was about to say something, Virginia got up and left early for bed. She had barely touched her wine. Alone at the table, he finished it for her.
After clearing away the plates and drinking another beer, Colin went into the bedroom and crawled into bed as his wife was reading. She had her glasses on, the ones that pinched the bridge of her nose if she wore them too long. Colin liked to joke that that was a good thing. She wouldn’t hurt her eyes with too much reading. The man laid by his wife and closed his eyes. He tried to sleep, and Virginia kept on with her book. It was difficult to focus, though. None of the words on the page seemed to filter through to her, and she had to keep going back over certain passages. At the end of the second to last chapter she set down her book and shook her husband softly.
“Colin? Colin?” she whispered.
“I’m awake, dear. What is it?” His eyes fluttered open as he shifted to his back. Virginia was looming over him now. Maybe it was the way she had shifted to face him, but her nightgown began to slip off her left shoulder. She looked thin.
“I don’t think I feel right.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, what if...what if I’m different somehow?” she said, rubbing her throat.
“Honey, I don’t think it’s that kind of-”
“The doctor said it could change my mood, my hormones.”
“I think he just meant that you might be grumpier or happier than usual. Maybe in a kind of unexpected way.”
“Hmmm,” she grunted.
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
“What if I’m really different? Like suddenly I don't like to read anymore?”
“But you’ve loved reading your whole life.”
“I know, but I don’t like this book. I keep trying, but it just won’t stick.”
“Well, get another book then,” he said before giving an exasperated sigh.
“It’s not about the book!” she barked.
They both fell silent after that. Colin was overthinking what he should say next, trying to find a way to appease his wife, and Virginia was stewing over this attempted appeasement. She crossed her arms and sat rigid and upright in bed. She didn’t want to be appeased. More than that she had a need to be understood, which she said went back to her mother. Her mother was overworked, never having time for her daughter, and her father had never been there in the first place. Growing up there were nights when she couldn’t sleep, and Virginia would try to subconsciously transmit her needs and wants to her mother. She imagined them as little packages, sometimes plain but sometimes done up in bows and wrapping paper. A pile would wait at her mother’s bedside, which she would find in the morning and open up. And then everything would be okay.
But now she imagined them as knives going straight into Colin. Her husband raised himself up on his arm and looked at her with dull, flat eyes. She suspected he was a bit drunk.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It wasn’t what she needed to hear from him, but at least it was earnest. He was trying to listen. “People change. It’s okay,” he said. She pulled her legs underneath her and turned more toward him. “It’s normal even. You remember my buddy, Craig, the one who got in that car accident? Well, he’s never been the same.”
“Oh my god, Colin, that was a traumatic brain injury. That’s totally different.”
“I know, but-”
“What I’m trying to say is, what if the person I was meant to be is the person with this disease? What if I’m becoming that person now?” Colin was nonplussed. To him, change was change, and that was okay. Moreover, his wife didn’t seem any different. More adamant, maybe. But she looked and talked the same, he thought. As far as he could tell anyway.
“You don’t seem any different to me,” he offered.
Virginia shook her head. “What if I’m not the same woman anymore? What if I suddenly want a baby? What if-”
“Do you want a baby?”
“No, I’m not saying that! At least not right now, but what if I change my mind?”
“Then we’ll deal with it,” he said.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. To Colin it seemed that simple, but obviously he was missing something. He reached out and put his arm around his wife, but that only seemed to annoy her more. She pulled away from him, turned off the light, and laid down in bed. “Goodnight,” she muttered.
“Goodnight,” he said. Colin hoped that he would be able to sort this out in the morning, but the night stayed a long time. He slept fitfully. All that beer in him kept sloshing around, pushing on his bladder. In between his wakings, he dreamed he was walking through a dark forest, trying to reach the ocean at its end. He could hear the waves breaking beyond the trees. It was too black to know for sure where he was going, but sometimes light would penetrate the thick wood. Small beams wormed their way through and illuminated things seemingly at random: a small patch of moss, a badger's den, a fallen tree.
He continued on past these illuminated tableaus and toward the growing sound of the ocean. Just when it seemed near to him, the light burst through the wood and was refracted upwards all at once, flooding the canopy. He saw that the trees above were hung with little bird cages, but they were all open and empty. They carried only feathers and droppings and the split shells of seeds. Colin stopped and looked upward, but immediately the light dimmed, and he woke up. He stumbled out of his dream and into the bathroom. Then he had to sneak back into bed without waking up his wife. He had no idea if he was successful in this or not.
When Colin woke up in the morning his head hurt, and his wife was gone. He looked around for her, but she wasn’t in the kitchen or out back, and her car wasn’t in the driveway. He sat down to make himself breakfast and coffee, deciding mid-pour he didn’t feel well enough to go in today. He would wait for Virginia at home. After calling out of work, he sat on the front porch with his coffee. It was still early, the sun was low, and it was surprisingly cool for the summer. The trees cast their shadows like they had the day before, but now they went away from the porch. Colin watched as they shortened in the rising sun.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat out on the porch, but it was long enough to finish his coffee and to start feeling anxious about his wife. Colin went back inside and called the hardware store to see if she had picked up a shift. She hadn’t. He was about to call her best friend, Barbara, but he put down the phone at the last second. He would sit with his worry a while longer, so he made himself another pot of coffee.
It was almost lunch by the time Virginia got home. At the sound of a car pulling into the drive, Colin turned off the television and looked toward the door. Virginia walked in and set down her purse and a few shopping bags; Colin jumped up from the couch to greet her. He ran up to his wife and hugged her deeply, but when he pulled back he could see she looked different. Her hair was short, and her bangs swept left across her forehead. These strands of hair were lighter, almost red, and had a few highlights. Colin smiled and complimented his wife on her new look. She looked good, but even more so he was relieved to know where she had been all morning. Then he offered her a coffee and a spot next to him on the couch. Virginia silently accepted.
Husband and wife sat next to each other sipping their coffee, but Virginia didn’t drink much. She set down the cup and glanced at the strange details of the home, her eyes moving from the heavy, leather-backed chairs in the dining room to the towering grandfather clock that had once belonged to some relative or another. Colin watched her over the top of his mug. It wasn’t just her hair that was different. He’d also never seen her jacket before. She must have just bought it when she was out. It was a light nylon coat that was gray but trimmed with soft black. It shimmered in their bright living room, and reflected light up to her face. Her skin took in this light, which made Virginia look younger and equanimous.
They didn’t say anything to each other for a long time, but eventually Virginia looked over at her husband. Colin smiled at her and reached out, putting his hand on his wife’s thigh. He asked her how she was feeling. But the woman didn’t react. She just sat there for a moment, looking at the hand lying on her leg. Then she stood up. The man’s hand slid off her lap, and the woman turned away from him. She began to walk toward the kitchen but stopped and hesitated. The man observed her as she struggled to figure out where to go. Her eyes shifted focus from one door to another, and then she broke for the bedroom, stepping inside and closing the door tight behind her.
The man sat still on the couch, watching the door for a time. He leaned forward and inclined his ear toward the room. Straining through the silence, he tried to hear what was happening on the other side. It sounded like nothing until it didn’t. He could just barely make out the voice of another man. He was talking very softly with the woman. They must be sitting on the bed together, he thought. But then there was the sound of a child laughing. It drowned out the other voices, and he pictured a young girl, her laughter whistling through the gap in her teeth. Next were several voices talking over each other and then shushing all at once, and it went quiet. The man stood up and stepped toward the door and the room behind it, but he stopped when he heard the voice of the woman.
Chris Blexrud is a librarian and writer living in Albuquerque.
by Chris Blexrud
This piece is inspired by and loosely alludes to Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love.”
The doctor slid the translucent film into an illuminated frame on the wall and pointed to an area on the X-ray, a dark blotch just above the center of the neck or a bit below the chin. Colin scrutinized the spot. It didn’t look like anything to him, or it just looked like bones, the way bones appear in an X-ray: translucent, white, and blurry. As if sensing the man’s incredulity, the doctor tapped the dark patch again, tracing the area with his finger. Colin turned to his wife and looked at her body for the spot the doctor was talking about. Embarrassed, Virginia pulled her sweater tight around her neck. Then they both turned and attempted to pay attention to what the man was saying. According to the doctor, something was afoot in her neck.
The doctor flipped a switch and the wall behind him went black. The image was gone, and the small exam room suddenly felt smaller. He turned next to a cabinet and pulled out a medical diagram. He unfurled it in front of them and held it by the top. It was a large poster, almost four feet long, and its edges still curled up at the bottom a bit. With his free hand, the doctor reached in front of the image to point again. His finger landed on the chin of the female figure in the diagram. He looked down over the top of the poster to make sure his finger was in the right place and shifted his hand about an inch down to the woman’s neck.
She seemed unconcerned with his touch. Her lips were flat, balancing a small smile, and her eyes stared straight ahead. Virginia liked her cool demeanor and haircut. She thought it looked sporty, the way her short red bangs parted to the left. She started to imagine the rich and vibrant life of this woman, but was interrupted by the doctor’s talking. He circled the area on the diagram with his finger. He said how this organ in her throat was the thyroid, and how it was very important for her body and her health.
Colin thought this thing, this thyroid, looked like a pair of chicken lungs, and a memory came back to him. As a kid growing up on a farm, the chickens used to be his responsibility. He had to let them out in the morning, collect their eggs, feed them, and then coop them back up at night. On a cold morning when he was eight, one of the field hands got his attention. He asked the boy if he knew what a chicken looked like inside. Of course he did, his father had him kill one year ago. “No,” the man said, “what’s really inside.” He led Colin out behind the silo where a coyote had gotten to one of the birds. He had only eaten part of it before getting scared off, so it was just lying there missing its head and a wing.
The field hand picked up the body that was stiff with the cold and lifted it up to Colin’s face. Then the man cut into it with the big knife he kept in his boot. Not bothering to defeather the bird as the boy had been taught to do, the man broke open the breast with his hands and started digging around inside. Colin watched as he pulled out one organ after another, naming them as if this were some kind of lesson. He remembered how the man put the chicken lungs flat against his palm and gently brushed them apart with his grimy fingers. In all that blood, they glided open. They were just two pink triangles connected by a thread. They seemed too small, even for a chicken, and their bumpy texture reminded him of the felt shapes he played with in school.
Afterward, Colin watched as the man dumped the organs on the ground and wiped the blade on his jeans. He drew the knife hard across his thigh, smearing the denim almost black with blood before slipping it back into his boot. Then the man cleaned his hands on the grass, and someone hollered for him, so he ran off. He just left Colin there with a pile of guts and the bloody grass and the feathers. Colin thought he should tell someone about what happened, but he never did. That farm hand wasn’t around for much longer anyway. He got in trouble for something or other that summer, and Colin never saw him again. But he remembered the man, and whenever he would return to that spot behind the silo he always seemed to find a few feathers.
Yep, Colin thought, the thyroid looked just like chicken lungs, except they were turned upside down in the human body. The man in the white coat explained that it was not uncommon for people in middle age to develop thyroid problems and that Virginia possibly had Hashimoto’s Disease, but he would have to run more tests to be sure. After that there was a long moment of silence until Virginia poked her husband in the side, urging him to say something. Colin came to and asked the doctor if it was dangerous and if there was a cure. The doctor laughed in a warm but slightly condescending way. No, it wasn’t dangerous or fatal, but it couldn’t be cured per se. It was easy enough to manage, though.
Virginia just needed to sleep and eat well, and she would be just fine, provided she took whatever drugs they were going to prescribe her. The doctor explained that, so long as it was properly managed, she wouldn’t have any major symptoms. She might feel tired, moody, or hormonal, or she might gain or lose weight. She might even act strangely from time to time. Colin thought that wasn’t any different than how she was normally. The doctor then asked if they were planning on getting pregnant. “They,” Colin laughed to himself. Virginia shook her head.
The doctor nodded. “Good… well, not good. You know what I mean.” This condition would make it harder for Virginia to have a baby, but it was by no means impossible. Medical science could do a lot to help the process. Virginia smiled and thanked him. The doctor offered to answer any more questions, but neither of them had any. He said he would be in touch after he got more test results back. Then he showed them to the door and stuffed a prescription in her hand on the way out.
Colin offered to drive on the way home, which Virginia thought was a nice gesture. He smiled at his wife as they pulled onto the freeway, and she smiled back at him, but they said next to nothing. It was a long drive home to the country, and Colin could sense that his wife was upset. She usually was very chatty in the car, especially when she was the passenger. He leaned over and put his hand on her thigh. “Come on,” he said, “it’s good news if you think about it.” She looked at him gravely. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. Virginia nodded and forced a smile. “Don’t be like that. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. He waited a moment.
“Is it about the baby?” he asked.
“No, it’s not about the baby,” she said.
“Well, do you feel alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good,” he said, but he knew something was bothering her. Colin expected he could get it out of her later, maybe after dinner or over some wine. But for the time being, they drove just listening to the radio.
When they got back it was late but still bright out. The high summer sun hung above the tree line, and the woods cast long shadows that reached the porch of their house. Colin parked the car, and Virginia hopped out and went inside. But Colin took his time. He stood on the porch for a bit, and he watched the shifting light and growing shadows, noting how different they looked from one moment to the next. In short order, the shadows spread to the spot where Colin was standing. They climbed up his old boots and passed him on the way to the welcome mat with the faded letters. Just as they threatened to overtake the front door, he went inside. By then Virginia had already set about making dinner. Colin asked if she needed any help, but she just shooed him out of the kitchen. He sat in the living room, drinking beer and watching television.
Later, when they sat down to dinner, they talked like they always did. Colin made his jokes, and Virginia brought up the people in their lives. To Colin it was gossip, but Virginia said that it wasn’t gossip unless it was bad. If it was positive, it was just news. She had a point. After they finished, they sat and had a drink together. The whole dinner Colin had waited for the right opening to interrogate his wife about how she felt, or he had been hoping she would do it for him. But just as he was about to say something, Virginia got up and left early for bed. She had barely touched her wine. Alone at the table, he finished it for her.
After clearing away the plates and drinking another beer, Colin went into the bedroom and crawled into bed as his wife was reading. She had her glasses on, the ones that pinched the bridge of her nose if she wore them too long. Colin liked to joke that that was a good thing. She wouldn’t hurt her eyes with too much reading. The man laid by his wife and closed his eyes. He tried to sleep, and Virginia kept on with her book. It was difficult to focus, though. None of the words on the page seemed to filter through to her, and she had to keep going back over certain passages. At the end of the second to last chapter she set down her book and shook her husband softly.
“Colin? Colin?” she whispered.
“I’m awake, dear. What is it?” His eyes fluttered open as he shifted to his back. Virginia was looming over him now. Maybe it was the way she had shifted to face him, but her nightgown began to slip off her left shoulder. She looked thin.
“I don’t think I feel right.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, what if...what if I’m different somehow?” she said, rubbing her throat.
“Honey, I don’t think it’s that kind of-”
“The doctor said it could change my mood, my hormones.”
“I think he just meant that you might be grumpier or happier than usual. Maybe in a kind of unexpected way.”
“Hmmm,” she grunted.
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”
“What if I’m really different? Like suddenly I don't like to read anymore?”
“But you’ve loved reading your whole life.”
“I know, but I don’t like this book. I keep trying, but it just won’t stick.”
“Well, get another book then,” he said before giving an exasperated sigh.
“It’s not about the book!” she barked.
They both fell silent after that. Colin was overthinking what he should say next, trying to find a way to appease his wife, and Virginia was stewing over this attempted appeasement. She crossed her arms and sat rigid and upright in bed. She didn’t want to be appeased. More than that she had a need to be understood, which she said went back to her mother. Her mother was overworked, never having time for her daughter, and her father had never been there in the first place. Growing up there were nights when she couldn’t sleep, and Virginia would try to subconsciously transmit her needs and wants to her mother. She imagined them as little packages, sometimes plain but sometimes done up in bows and wrapping paper. A pile would wait at her mother’s bedside, which she would find in the morning and open up. And then everything would be okay.
But now she imagined them as knives going straight into Colin. Her husband raised himself up on his arm and looked at her with dull, flat eyes. She suspected he was a bit drunk.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It wasn’t what she needed to hear from him, but at least it was earnest. He was trying to listen. “People change. It’s okay,” he said. She pulled her legs underneath her and turned more toward him. “It’s normal even. You remember my buddy, Craig, the one who got in that car accident? Well, he’s never been the same.”
“Oh my god, Colin, that was a traumatic brain injury. That’s totally different.”
“I know, but-”
“What I’m trying to say is, what if the person I was meant to be is the person with this disease? What if I’m becoming that person now?” Colin was nonplussed. To him, change was change, and that was okay. Moreover, his wife didn’t seem any different. More adamant, maybe. But she looked and talked the same, he thought. As far as he could tell anyway.
“You don’t seem any different to me,” he offered.
Virginia shook her head. “What if I’m not the same woman anymore? What if I suddenly want a baby? What if-”
“Do you want a baby?”
“No, I’m not saying that! At least not right now, but what if I change my mind?”
“Then we’ll deal with it,” he said.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. To Colin it seemed that simple, but obviously he was missing something. He reached out and put his arm around his wife, but that only seemed to annoy her more. She pulled away from him, turned off the light, and laid down in bed. “Goodnight,” she muttered.
“Goodnight,” he said. Colin hoped that he would be able to sort this out in the morning, but the night stayed a long time. He slept fitfully. All that beer in him kept sloshing around, pushing on his bladder. In between his wakings, he dreamed he was walking through a dark forest, trying to reach the ocean at its end. He could hear the waves breaking beyond the trees. It was too black to know for sure where he was going, but sometimes light would penetrate the thick wood. Small beams wormed their way through and illuminated things seemingly at random: a small patch of moss, a badger's den, a fallen tree.
He continued on past these illuminated tableaus and toward the growing sound of the ocean. Just when it seemed near to him, the light burst through the wood and was refracted upwards all at once, flooding the canopy. He saw that the trees above were hung with little bird cages, but they were all open and empty. They carried only feathers and droppings and the split shells of seeds. Colin stopped and looked upward, but immediately the light dimmed, and he woke up. He stumbled out of his dream and into the bathroom. Then he had to sneak back into bed without waking up his wife. He had no idea if he was successful in this or not.
When Colin woke up in the morning his head hurt, and his wife was gone. He looked around for her, but she wasn’t in the kitchen or out back, and her car wasn’t in the driveway. He sat down to make himself breakfast and coffee, deciding mid-pour he didn’t feel well enough to go in today. He would wait for Virginia at home. After calling out of work, he sat on the front porch with his coffee. It was still early, the sun was low, and it was surprisingly cool for the summer. The trees cast their shadows like they had the day before, but now they went away from the porch. Colin watched as they shortened in the rising sun.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat out on the porch, but it was long enough to finish his coffee and to start feeling anxious about his wife. Colin went back inside and called the hardware store to see if she had picked up a shift. She hadn’t. He was about to call her best friend, Barbara, but he put down the phone at the last second. He would sit with his worry a while longer, so he made himself another pot of coffee.
It was almost lunch by the time Virginia got home. At the sound of a car pulling into the drive, Colin turned off the television and looked toward the door. Virginia walked in and set down her purse and a few shopping bags; Colin jumped up from the couch to greet her. He ran up to his wife and hugged her deeply, but when he pulled back he could see she looked different. Her hair was short, and her bangs swept left across her forehead. These strands of hair were lighter, almost red, and had a few highlights. Colin smiled and complimented his wife on her new look. She looked good, but even more so he was relieved to know where she had been all morning. Then he offered her a coffee and a spot next to him on the couch. Virginia silently accepted.
Husband and wife sat next to each other sipping their coffee, but Virginia didn’t drink much. She set down the cup and glanced at the strange details of the home, her eyes moving from the heavy, leather-backed chairs in the dining room to the towering grandfather clock that had once belonged to some relative or another. Colin watched her over the top of his mug. It wasn’t just her hair that was different. He’d also never seen her jacket before. She must have just bought it when she was out. It was a light nylon coat that was gray but trimmed with soft black. It shimmered in their bright living room, and reflected light up to her face. Her skin took in this light, which made Virginia look younger and equanimous.
They didn’t say anything to each other for a long time, but eventually Virginia looked over at her husband. Colin smiled at her and reached out, putting his hand on his wife’s thigh. He asked her how she was feeling. But the woman didn’t react. She just sat there for a moment, looking at the hand lying on her leg. Then she stood up. The man’s hand slid off her lap, and the woman turned away from him. She began to walk toward the kitchen but stopped and hesitated. The man observed her as she struggled to figure out where to go. Her eyes shifted focus from one door to another, and then she broke for the bedroom, stepping inside and closing the door tight behind her.
The man sat still on the couch, watching the door for a time. He leaned forward and inclined his ear toward the room. Straining through the silence, he tried to hear what was happening on the other side. It sounded like nothing until it didn’t. He could just barely make out the voice of another man. He was talking very softly with the woman. They must be sitting on the bed together, he thought. But then there was the sound of a child laughing. It drowned out the other voices, and he pictured a young girl, her laughter whistling through the gap in her teeth. Next were several voices talking over each other and then shushing all at once, and it went quiet. The man stood up and stepped toward the door and the room behind it, but he stopped when he heard the voice of the woman.
Chris Blexrud is a librarian and writer living in Albuquerque.