They have vestiges of sex, like when a phantom limb feels pain. He is her man, and she pledged him her devotion, but she mispronounced troth at the altar, so does her pledge of fidelity count? Like, forever? How dead does she have to be?
If they wished, they could unpaper the mirror with the gold-painted frame that she’d inherited from her grandmother, and angle it against the living room wall (they would have to move the couch first, and probably sweep up the dog hair and dust).
She completes this unpapering and angling on Wednesday, but not the sweeping. She makes a pan of brownies from a box and eats half of them. He doesn’t notice the mirror or moved couch when he gets home, but he eats the rest of the brownies. He leaves the soapy pan in the sink for her to scrub. She puts it under their bed.
To make their phantom limb appear, they need another mirror, Marsha decides, at a right angle to the first. She would have to take down the closet mirror from their daughter’s room and hope it doesn’t come loose from the cardboard frame.
She moves the closet mirror on Thursday. She finds a baggie of pot at the back of the daughter’s closet and smokes some from a carved apple. Her husband says she is more agreeable when stoned.
Her husband hasn’t bothered to offer up good sex since the bombing in Oklahoma. A coincidence? Marsha flips through obsolete American history textbooks from the recycling boxes at work every few springs, and is dismayed that the paragraph devoted to that bombing, with its requisite vocabulary words in blue print, such as terrorist, heartland, and commitment, and its comprehension skill focus (making inferences) have been deleted in recent editions. The event still appears in the timeline at the start of the chapter (Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995), but so many bombings have happened since that the textbook publishers believe the one at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building adds no marketable value. It isn’t part of the Common Core.
Timothy McVeigh (death by lethal injection) and Terry Nichols (161 sentences of life imprisonment) are in the factoid reject pile with anarchist Leon Czolgosz, slayer of William McKinley (death by electrocution); thwarted, self-appointed ambassador to France Charles Guiteau, slayer of James Garfield (death by hanging); and numerous failed presidential assassins.
She fantasizes in the shower, lying in the bathtub after the hot water drains, and the soap scum she is too lazy to scrub is a dreamy echo of single life: bathing in strangers’ homes, getting fucked hard against tile mold. Staring at bottles of cheap shampoo and scary slivers of Ivory soap.
Or a dark room. Someone says, “I am going to fuck you.” It’s quite cause-effect. They pull the quilt to the floor. Arched back. Thrusting. Legs open. Grinding into the black. Sucked and twisted nipples. Why stay in one room? Stuck on a cock on the edge of the stairs, gripping a banister. Stuck on a cock, hands down on the stairs. No eye contact. No eyes. Eyes shut.
Girls’ toy aisles are odes to future orgasms: pink candy shock that radiates outward through the all-purpose clit aisle. Pink is tacky. Couldn’t she come in rich velvet? Emerald? Vermillion? Ever? Apparently not in this house. Not in this marriage.
Her husband could undress her, and she, him, and they could stand by the mirrors so that the missing limb, their sex life, is visible. They schedule a date night for Thursday. Thursday is the new Friday. But he calls her at the bar, where she waits in a booth and fingers the salad dressing in its ceramic dish, that he has to work late. She licks the small dish clean. A woman in the next booth stares at her over a menu. She wears a black headband with cat ears, which keeps back her curls, and skeleton earrings. Marsha nods at her. She has forgotten about Halloween. Or is all of October Halloween now? She slips over many things, though not odd things people tell her, like when an old roommate had sex with a woman who licked his hairy armpit, right across his white deodorant strip.
The next week they flip a coin and he decides they should go to a reading of his co-worker, who signed up for a memoir class to write about his dental troubles.
She sometimes dreams her teeth fall out in her mouth. Or two in the front are missing and no one told her. A gummy expanse. Is that a vestige from her childhood? Where are all her milk teeth?
Once again, the husband makes an excuse to not show up. Hives. He sends a photo, large red welts on his neck and down his chest. “Itchy,” he texts. Then he sends a photo of the brownie pan under the bed.
Marsha goes out of spite, downing a couple of glasses of wine before entering the pub. She pushes open the door and slices her index finger on the edge of a poster. Blood oozes out. Is this enough of an excuse to leave? Biohazard? She sits among strangers, sucking the gash. She heard that’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s OK to drift. This is not a textbook. You will not be graded.
empty > Start with his nipples
empty > Then he moves to hers.
empty > Need to store dirty laundry separate from the clean.
empty > The man at the podium has buttoned all his buttons on his black polo shirt. He’s talking about his depression.
empty > Then they go to the toes,
empty > Then they end with him, or her, blindfolded, on the floor, on all fours, and he’s playing with her, all over, and fucking her, all over.
Fucking is a nicer word than screwing. Screwing sounds like network TV, water beds, scratchy sheets, tube socks, and sticky clock radios. Mystery thuds from the floor above. Lost panties. Maybe lost panties could be fucking, especially if he wears them after she leaves?
Lee Harvey Oswald has snuck into the recent Texas edition of U.S. history, eleventh grade, because the state has a huge textbook market, and the textbook adopters want their doomed man to shine (death by gunshot wound to the abdomen). John Wilkes Booth appears in two of the three approved textbooks (death by gunshot wound to the neck). He’s been rumored to have won his own “Bad Guys We Still Love” sidebar, with an optional personal response prompt, because the Secretary of Education is distantly related to Booth’s uncle.
empty > The couple beside her shares alcohol. She buys another glass of wine.
empty > The man at the podium speaks, and she’s sure his wife has purchased this special polo shirt. He is depressed and talks about “my victimhood.” She tries to swallow the wine in her mouth really slowly.
empty > She gets a dirty look from someone because she is too loud with her plastic cup.
empty > She wants joy.
empty > “My personality enabled my persecution,” says the man. He calls his wife “my beloved.”
Female bombers are rare in the United States. But two New York women have been arrested for planning a terrorist attack against military and police targets. Their asses now lodged in chilly cells. Their homes, most likely vacuumed and scrubbed, held tools for mass harm, blood-stained sidewalks, the carnage of exploded flesh: propane gas tanks, instructions on how to make car bombs, knives, machetes, and soldering equipment. Methodical. Learning chemistry basics and watching how-to YouTube guides on electrical wiring. The women studied bombings in Oklahoma, at the Boston marathon, and at the World Trade Center in 1993 (also omitted from recent textbooks). An undercover female cop, posing as a convert, betrayed them in a sting. They pled guilty. The women will rot in prison for up to two decades, most likely despised because (ignorant) people will conflate their religion with their hate. Asia Siddiqui and Noelle Velentzas will not be in a textbook. Maybe they’ll end up on a Netflix series: Jihadists of Queens. One hoped to go to heaven. Maybe she still does.
The next Thursday Marsha and her husband stand in front of the angled mirrors, naked, but her husband wears a vintage tie. The outside has embroidered emblems of vice: a die, a martini glass, a racing horse.
“Open it,” he says.
Inside the fold is a voluptuous blonde woman, nude, her legs crossed. Marsha nods in approval. “You dog,” she says, and smiles.
His hives have faded, and he sucks in his paunch and cups his hand over Marsha’s ass. A tall man, he spreads his legs like a V so he can reach her more easily to kiss. This is a new posture. She wonders. Doesn’t ask. He smells like lemongrass soap, like he could be her; his skin, hers. Mirrored glass: the cold infinity view of their joined selves, their faded vanity, the opposite of blast heat.
Alex Behr is the author of the story collections Animal Kingdom and Planet Grim, both on 7.13 Books, and the poetry chapbook Grief Stick, from Picture Frame Press. Her writing has been published in Tin House, Epiphany, Salon, Heavy Feather Review, The Rumpus, Buckman Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, in anthologies, and others. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and plays piano and bass guitar. She teaches writing workshops through Literary Arts.
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