Love Means Zero

This story by Mike Wilson appears in Stylus Lit March 2022 issue

                                                             The Flight

Derrick chews his last honey-glazed airplane peanut and gazes greedily at the unopened cellophane packet on the tray of the girl seated next to him. Then the pilot’s voice over the intercom intrudes. We have some turbulence in the air up ahead. Everyone needs to fasten seat belts and keep them fastened. Attendants, please prepare the cabin.

But this isn’t the same adult-in-charge voice that so calmly and smoothly initiated the flight, the Morgan Freeman-sounding voice that earlier described destinations, distances, elevations, and flight times. No, this is the voice of a man who’s seen a ghost and is trying not to talk too fast. Flight attendants scurry down the aisle with black plastic bags. They seize unfinished drinks, command trays be lifted and locked. Seat belts click like swords clashing. Derrick’s peripheral vision puckers, draws close to his body, a protective poncho. He fumbles with his seat belt, worries it won’t work, but it does. He pulls it a notch tighter across his lap.

Now that he’s secure, Derrick dials his vigilance back and surveys other passengers for clues about how worried he should be. No one’s smiling, but no one’s hyperventilating either. It’s just turbulence, right? A large man with thick black hair, greased back, and aftershave strong enough to smell across the aisle has his seat reclined with his eyes closed, as if settling in for a nap. Derrick surreptitiously glances at the lady with streaks of gray in her hair sitting to his left. She’s determinedly reading one of the seat pocket airline magazines. The girl to his right, whose peanuts he’d coveted, looks out the window. Derrick senses she’s thinking not about turbulence in the air, but someone waiting for her on the ground.

The hiss of the intercom interrupts Derrick’s speculations. We’re running into a thunderstorm we’ll have to fly through. Everyone remain seated with seat belts fastened. The announcement makes Derrick uneasy. A little rough air isn’t unusual, but Derrick thought pilots flew around thunderstorms. As the plane descends, rain splatters the windows of the plane. The storm must be near the Atlanta airport. The storm must be unavoidable.

Derrick feels his body lift toward the ceiling as the plane suddenly drops and a few people shriek. The plane steadies, but the wings tip down to the left and then to the right. The big guy with greased-back hair across the aisle sits straight up. The woman to his left who’d been trying to read stuffs her magazine into the pocket on back of the seat in front of her. She grabs the armrests, readying for the next surprise. Like Derrick, she’s flying alone with no trusted hand to hold or to hold hers. 

The girl to Derrick’s right has her phone out. He’s impressed she’s cool enough to surf the Internet during this kind of turbulence until he realizes she’s texting. Should Derrick text Sophie? Why? The pilot hasn’t said the storm will delay arrival. What would Derrick say? OMG thunderstorm. B glad when we land. Nonetheless, Derrick digs in his pants pocket for his phone.

Flash, and Boom! so loud it hurts his ears. Several people scream. Derrick is holding his breath. The plane continues to fly and Derrick exhales. Someone says we were struck by lightning. The storm pounds against the windows, pings that sound like hail, and the plane tips side to side. Should Derrick call someone? He taps Sophie’s number in his phone and listens to it ring someplace safe on the ground. Hi. This is Sophie. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.

Flash and Boom! Derrick drops the phone. His ears are ringing. The plane is level but dropping like a wounded bird. A flight attendant comes down the aisle, holding onto seat backs for balance, and stops at Derrick’s row. She looks out Derrick’s window. He looks, too. The outermost engine on the wing is smoking. Engine noise suddenly accelerates and the plane no longer feels like it’s falling. The intercom comes on, but it must be inadvertent – the pilot is talking to somebody else. Derrick can’t make out what’s being said. Then Derrick hears the breath of the pilot in the microphone.

We took a couple of lightning hits. It’s unusual, but it happens. One of the engines isn’t functioning but we have plenty of power with the other three. We’re checking systems. Hopefully, we’ve gone through the worst of it. We’ll try to land in Atlanta rather divert. Please keep your seat belts fastened.

Derrick parses the pilot’s message. Try to land in Atlanta. Does the word try mean if they can’t land in Atlanta they’ll land somewhere else? Or does it mean they will try to land but might crash? Derrick doesn’t have a Last Will and Testament. Where is his phone? He runs his hands over his lap, feels behind and under his bottom, leans forward to look at the floor as he explores with his foot. The plane suddenly drops again and he grabs the back of the seat in front of him for stability.

The lady to his left has closed her eyes. She’s praying. The girl beside him is hunched over, curling herself closer to the seat as if to make herself a smaller target. The frame of the plane shudders and the engines whine. Derrick notices the rain is slackening, but the body of the plane continues to bounce on pockets of air and not-air. Through the gray of the rain and clouds Derrick sees land. He doesn’t know whether that’s good or bad.

He remembers his phone and mourns losing it. If he’s facing possible death, a phone is what he needs most. To call Sophie. To call his attorney and dictate a will. To call his parents and apologize for being an ungrateful child. To call God, if God has 911. Derrick smells ammonia, sees the wet spot in the lap of the lady to his left. He puts his hand on hers. She lets go of the armrest, intertwines her fingers with his. Whatever happens, at least Derrick is helping someone.

He looks out the window again. The ground is closer. Derrick hears thunder and sees lightning strike intermittently across the horizon like Christmas lights blinking. At a distance, it’s beautiful. Derrick feels the plane sink and hears the wheels come down. He’s always a little anxious during landings, always tries to anticipate touch-down as if he’s in a swimming pool reaching for the bottom with his toes. But this landing is different. This storm is an angry Zeus that could grab the plane and dash it to the ground if it wants.

The plane drops into the misty grayness carpeting the ground in Atlanta. The edge of the runway appears outside the window. The wings of the plane tip up and down like a tightrope walker seeking balance. Derrick holds his breath. The back wheel on the left hits first, then the right wheel drops like a barbell on the gym floor. The nose stays in the air, as if the plane is doing an involuntary wheelie, then slams to the tarmac. The plane rolls like a runaway stagecoach that’s going to crash into the terminal. Derrick imagines the plane compacted like a junked car, passengers mangled and mashed. The pilot reverses the engine thrust and immediately the plane slows. The landscape no longer races past Derrick’s window. He releases his breath.

The intercom switches on. Derrick pays no attention to the words, only to the sound of relief in the pilot’s voice. Everyone is unclicking seat belts and gathering themselves to deplane this doomed bird.

“Did somebody lose a phone?”

 A young guy with dyed purple hair in the seat in front of Derrick holds Derrick’s phone in the air. Derrick claims it. He and the purple-hair guy look into each other’s eyes and affirm a world where humans look out for each other.

Instead of disembarking through a jetway bridge directly into the terminal, the passengers descend a set of stairs that have been rolled onto the runway. As they cross around the plane Derrick stops to look at the plane. He sees a black mark on the fuselage and another on the disabled engine. He reconstructs where he sat on the plane in relation to those two marks, mentally measures in feet how near he was to the lightning strikes. I almost died. Instinctively, and in less than a split second, he pushes that thought away, beyond striking distance.

Derrick follows other passengers up a narrow stairwell into the terminal proper,  floating like a kite after the string is cut, belonging to nobody. He has a three-hour layover to kill before his next flight, but what he really, really needs right now is a place to sit quietly.

The departure lounge beside gate B36 is mostly empty. Derrick claims a seat, tries to relax, but can’t. Though he’s alone, he feels intruded upon. He wants something to distract his mind. He picks up a newspaper laying in the chair next to him and stares at headlines about rumors of war, gain and loss in the stock market, politicians lying, amusements that aren’t amusing. It gives him a headache. He scans the shops in the terminal corridor for a restaurant or bar. The plane’s on the ground but Derrick’s not. Derrick needs a drink.  

                                                                        #

The woman behind the bar looks to be in her 40s. Hefty poundage pillows her belly and hips. She wears the makeup of customer service but it doesn’t conceal her wariness, as if the world is a dog that might bite.

 “What can I get you honey?”

Derrick wonders if she calls everyone honey or if he looks like someone who needs to be called honey. He notices her name tag. Mary.

“I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

Mary rotates her girth and waddles away to prepare Derrick’s order. He follows her movements for a few feet and then the effort seems too much. But staring at unfocused space makes him anxious. He needs to fill that space with something. Fortunately, Mary quickly returns with his Bloody Mary and a napkin to put it on. She sets a bowl of mixed nuts in front of him.

The first sip hits his nervous system and numbs it. He thinks I’m in shock. But his sense perceptions remain heightened, as if ozone is in the air around him. He takes another sip. By the time Derrick’s glass is empty, he almost feels normal. He orders another. When Mary brings it, he tells her about the flight, recounts the story skillfully and finds that doing so gives him control over the event.  When Mary acts impressed, Derrick glows inwardly, like when the guy with purple hair gave him his phone. Mary tells Derrick about a flight her sister was on that turned around halfway because they thought there was a terrorist on board.  “Wow!” Derrick says, giving quid pro quo.  He picks up a handful of nuts from the bowl. He’s finally touched down, he’s back in his old life.

Mary brings the bill.  Derrick leaves cash to cover what’s due plus a twenty percent tip, maybe more – it’s too hard to do the math. He rises from his seat, steadies himself, and joins the flotsam floating through the airport from departure gate to departure gate. His mind once again fastens on the particulars of daily living that leave no room for death to get a foothold. Everything is okay.

This story by Mike Wilson appeared in Abrazos & Letters from the Self to the World, Writing for Peace, 2021

Every step is peace.

Carla was on flat ground beneath the speckled shade of a solitary sugar maple tree smack in the middle of a big field in Bent Creek Park. The field was empty this Thursday morning because schools were back in session for the fall. The place was a perfect natural dojo for tai chi, or moving meditation, as her sensei called it.

She was devoting her four-day staycation to the cultivation of mindfulness. No calls or texts from the law office where she worked. No mundane errands. No TV. Tai chi every morning. A vegetarian lunch. The rest of the day on the mediation cushion in her townhouse, placid as a lake of milk. By Monday, her mind would be a dustless mirror.

Carla slipped out of her sandals and wiggled her toes in waxy grass that tickled her feet. She walked around the tree, tuning in to the ground. With each step, the grass gave, then sprang back but not quite all the way, creating a wake of footprints behind her. She stopped and sank her weight, letting the earth’s energy rise into her body through the soles of her feet.  

The ground around the tree was mostly flat and level. She visualized the space that would be needed to perform the full sequence of moves and chose a starting spot that would allow her to complete the kata entirely on the flattest area. She relaxed her shoulders, letting her arms hang without tension. She slowed her breathing, quieted her mind, and concentrated her attention on her lower dan tien, an area just below her navel. When she felt rooted, she bowed and began the tai chi kata.

Carla moved slowly, without effort, like a weightless image. The air was dry but soft against her skin, and the sun felt warm when the steps of the form carried her out beyond the shadows of the tree. A light sweat emerged on her neck and forehead.

Suddenly, the roar of an engine starting up made her jump. She stopped and turned to look. It was a man on a riding lawnmower, his hair long and wild like Medusa’s snakes, wearing a too-short Metallica t-shirt, goggles, and firing range earmuffs. He was coming straight at her and not slowing down.  She backed away and let him pass. He ignored her, intent on carving a straight line through the middle of her natural dojo. The path he left behind was cropped to the ground, light brown showing through. The lawnmower man traveled a straight line until he reached the sidewalk by the tennis courts. Then he pivoted and began his return, following the edge of the first swath that he’d cut. The lawnmower backfired, and a puff of oily black smoke rose behind him.

She returned her attention to her body and her breath, tried to unify her chi, but found herself fantasizing about knocking the guy off his mower. When he passed by the second time, his belly fat jiggling, she glared, waiting for recognition from him that he was being rude. He ignored her. For Mr. Beer Belly in the Metallica shirt, nothing existed except scalping the earth and killing the grass. He was the Zen master of being an asshole.

“Excuse me!” Carla shouted, pointlessly, because the guy was wearing the firing range earmuffs. The lawnmower passed, leaving another brownish-green stripe along the ground like a dog wiping its butt across the carpet. She realized he would keep passing her tree every couple of minutes. She would have to move.

She knew of a spot at the west side of the field where the ground was even, but slightly sloped. She would treat the slant as a challenge. Tai chi masters could stay rooted on gable rooftops if they wanted, her sensei said. There was no tree on the west side to provide shade, but the west side would have to do. She slipped on her sandals and walked to the west side. As the noise of the lawnmower faded, the wrinkles in her mind straightened some, but she still felt anger vibrating in her chest.

When Carla reached her destination, she noticed that this part of the field bordered a subdivision. There were sounds of back doors shutting, cars starting, and garbage pick-up, but she was disciplined enough to ignore the noise. She surveyed the ground closely and plotted out a space sufficient to perform the kata over an area with the fewest bumpy places. She settled on a starting point and slipped off her sandals.

She relaxed her shoulders and allowed her arms to hang without tension, but the image of Beer Belly kept popping back up in her mind like one of those prank birthday candles that keeps re-lighting after you blow it out. She ignored the image and focused on dissipating the clouds of anger in her heart chakra. She slowed her breathing and shifted her attention to her lower dan tien. When she felt rooted, she bowed and began the tai chi kata, holding in her mind the thought that every step is peace.

When she was about one-third of the way through, she heard the lawnmower engine again, and when the sound of the engine grew louder, she stopped and looked. Beer Belly was driving his machine in what seemed to be an elliptical path. He wasn’t following along the edge of what had been mowed before. He was scalping an entirely new swath of ground and curving in her direction. As Beer Belly drew closer, it became transparent that he was aiming at her.

She stood, her hands on her hips, looking directly at him, defiant, like an environmental activist daring an ecosystem-wrecking bulldozer to run her over. But when Beer Belly showed no sign of slowing down, she backed away and let him pass, detecting, she thought, the hint of a smile on his face. He seemed to be joy-riding, driving through one part of the park for a few passes, then driving somewhere else for a while, and the blade on Beer Belly’s mower was so low that it sheared off some of the bumps in the ground and left scars. She wondered if he was on drugs. If Beer Belly was mowing the middle of the field and the west side, that left only the flat ground on the east side beside the parking lot. She noticed with dismay that the sun now was high in the sky. All this stopping and starting was eating up her meditation time.

Carla hurriedly slipped on her sandals and walked briskly to the opposite side of the park. She saw cars in the parking lot and two moms. One mom was un-collapsing a stroller she’d removed from her trunk while the other mom restrained a Labradoodle on a leash. There were a couple of little boys, too, ignoring the moms’ commands to stop chasing each other. She couldn’t tell these people to leave and didn’t have time to wait and see if they would. She mentally cursed Beer Belly and the noonday sun that reminded her she was behind schedule. She kicked off her sandals, turned her back to the parking lot moms and kids, and prepared to do tai chi.

She forced her attention inward and took deep breaths, filling her lungs deliberately from the bottom up, then emptying her lungs the same way, making the inhales and exhales match in duration. She relaxed her shoulders and allowed her arms to hang without tension. Every step is peace. She bowed and began the kata.

“Wahhh! Wahhh!”

 The baby wasn’t just crying – the baby was screaming bloody hell. Carla’s mind greedily latched onto the silence after each wail of woe, hoping it was the last. No such luck. The baby was just gathering breath to deliver the next scream even louder. Carla became so distracted by the baby’s distress that she forgot where she was in the kata and had to stop. She saw that the baby’s mother had maneuvered the stroller onto the paved walking path. When the mom shoved a bottle at the baby, the baby screams finally stopped. The other mom was waiting for the Labradoodle to sniff every blade of grass until she found the perfect place to go to the bathroom. It looked like they were preparing for a walk on the walking path. Carla was relieved. In moments, she would have the east side of the field to herself.  

She turned her back to the parking lot and tried to concentrate. She stilled her breath, relaxed her shoulders, and allowed her arms to hang without tension. She willed herself to be rooted. It wasn’t working, but she was behind schedule. She would have to work her way into the right frame of mind as she got into the kata. Every step is peace. She bowed and began the tai chi kata again. 

“What are you doing?”

 It was one of the little boys. She ignored him, stepping into the next move.

“Hey! Are you fighting?” one of them asked.

Where the hell are the mothers? She lifted her right foot to enter a one-legged stance, but lost her balance and almost toppled over. The boys laughed. She slowed her movement and tried to regain a low center of gravity. Suddenly, the two little boys were running in front of her, punching and kicking imaginary opponents in a kung fu movie. She tried to make her eyesight fuzzy so she couldn’t see them. When the boys tired of their sport, they ran to catch up with their mothers on the walking path. Carla couldn’t recall where she was in the kata, but she wasn’t starting over again. She just kept moving and recognized that she was performing moves from the middle of the form.

Suddenly the loud boom-boom of a bass speaker startled her. She glanced at the parking lot out of the corner of her eye and saw a parked vehicle with darkened windows shaking with the vibrations of the music. She tried to ignore the mindless pulsing punishing her eardrums and the anger building inside her like a pot about to boil. She was going to finish this frigging kata if it killed her.

As she stepped into the next move, turning to face north, she saw Beer Belly approaching on his machine. She stopped and stared at him. He was driving an elliptical path, a mirror image of the path he’d followed on the west side. Once again, he was curving toward Carla, the drone of his lawnmower punctuated by the boom-boom of the bass in the parking lot.

She visualized delivering a heel kick to Beer Belly’s face that would cause him to let go the steering wheel. She imagined grabbing his head with both hands and pulling down hard as she raised her left knee up to break his nose. She would jerk him off the mower and, as he sprawled on the ground, kick him in the groin, ribs or kidneys, depending upon which vulnerable area presented itself as the best target. She realized her fists were clenched and deliberately unclenched them, but with mixed feelings about doing so.

Beer Belly was thirty feet away, now, bearing down. She wasn’t going to back away this time. But when he reached ten feet, close enough for her to see the nail-impaled skull on his Metallica t-shirt, and showed no sign of slowing down, she leaped out of the way. As he passed, he seemed suddenly to see her. He smiled and waved.  Then she felt something warm and squishy between her toes, and remembered the Labradoodle. 

                                                                        #

It was past eleven that evening. Carla was parked in front of the TV. The eleven o’clock news was on, but she wasn’t really watching. She was drinking bourbon and smoking cigarettes, both of which she’d sworn off months ago, and outlining her plan of attack on a legal pad.

Beer Belly had been stalking her – two or more instances of harassment coupled with an implied threat of serious physical injury. It was a felony because he was armed with a dangerous instrumentality – the lawnmower. She’d file charges tomorrow. She’d also sue for damages. It was a public park, so he was probably an employee of the city. Beer Belly was going to prison and the city was going to write Carla a big, fat check.

“And finally, tonight, a story about peace,” the newscaster on TV said. Carla stopped writing to watch.

“Today was the United Nations’ International Day of Peace and a Lexington minister found a unique way to celebrate it– by mowing a giant peace sign in the field at Bent Creek Park.”

The screen switched to an aerial shot of the field. Lighter lines contrasted with the dark green of the grass to form a giant peace symbol, like some hippie crop circle.  The screen switched to an interview. It was Beer Belly, but instead of a Metallica t-shirt, he was wearing slacks and a white button-up shirt, his long hair combed back and fastened in a ponytail. His coke-bottle glasses were so thick you could barely see his eyes.

“A lot of planes fly over that park on their way to the airport,” he said. “When passengers look down and see the peace sign, they’ll remember – by giving peace we receive peace.”

Carla switched off the TV and stared at the empty black screen. After a few minutes, she took a deep breath, picked up her drink, carried it to the kitchen sink, and poured it out. Then, she went outside to the backyard. The night air was moist. The sky was pitch-black and clear. The stars were distinct points of light.

 She took off her shoes. The grass was cold and wet with dew. She relaxed her shoulders, allowing her arms to hang without tension. She slowed her breathing, quieted her mind, and concentrated her attention on her lower dan tien in her belly, and then on the heaven of stars above her, and then on the earth below supporting her. She imagined a line connecting all three points, imagined herself as that line.

She bowed and began the kata.

                                                        The Tao 

When Marvin woke in the morning, he always felt emptied, like a catharsis had happened in his sleep in dreams he couldn’t remember, clearing away clutter, as if he’d cleaned up the garage and now each tool was hanging in its proper place. When he pressed the button on the coffeemaker and the blue light lit up like a hello, he felt comforted, and even more so when the gentle gurgle and drip sound decorated the silence. Today would be a trouble-free expanse of happiness stretching like canvas that the Tao would paint according to its own rules and regulations. So much to look forward to. And it was still hours before dawn.

He poured his first cup of coffee and sat on the couch where he always sat. He picked up a book, but didn’t open it because reading sucked you into the minds of other people. Was it Sartre who said hell is other people? It was why Thoreau had lived alone at Walden Pond, but Sartre was the one who had articulated the inner truth. Marvin lived alone in this apartment south of the university. He’d once lived with his mother in the burbs in a house with a garage, but that was another story. The cop working the cold case had thought it odd that Marvin hadn’t kept any pictures of his mother, but having pictures would be like living with her again. Instead of the gurgle of the coffeemaker, he would hear his mother’s voice. Make yourself useful, clean up the garage. Annoying comments that always meant something entirely different than what she was saying.

            A fly buzzed by his face and Marvin’s eyes followed its flight. It landed on the coffee table. Marvin slowly raised the book over the table, then slammed down hard. The fly was too quick and it escaped. That was the Tao for you.

            Blue lights were flashing through the window, so Marvin got up to look. He watched the lights trail into the darkness. Most crime happened at night, but Marvin didn’t think it was because darkness made it hard for the victim to see what was coming. It was because the day’s clutter builds up, and clutter is stultifying and noisy, so by nightfall it has to be cleaned out. Cops always looked for motives. Every motive was only one motive – getting rid of the clutter. People always make things more complicated than they really are.

Marvin didn’t bother with motives. He looked for signs. The Tao unfolds in a series of signs that foreshadow everything, tiny mustard seeds growing into great trees, yin becoming yang and yang becoming yin. The blue lights were a sign. They were part of the Tao unfolding.

                                                                        #

            Marvin opened his eyes when the gong sounded ending the meditation session. It was time for the group’s break. The people around him stood, stretching stiff legs, and he did, too. No one said anything so as not to soil the tranquility they’d spent the past couple hours cultivating by emptying their minds, just watching thoughts bubbling up, letting them go like balloons released into the sky, floating away, eventually descending where birds, turtles, and fish would swallow them and die. Marvin had asked the meditation director where he thought the thoughts went when you let them go, and the director had said they just disappear. This, of course, is a lie. Nothing disappears. Thoughts just float to some street corner where they wait for a victim. Nothing is ever wasted by the Tao.

            Gradually, the meditators migrated to a room where a table was laid out with herbal tea and snacks. There would be talking, now, and Marvin felt anxiety build in his chest like a tea kettle boiling but you couldn’t hear the whistle. Someone would speak to him and he would have to talk back. He would have to justify his existence to this person and this person would dislike Marvin or would like him, which was worse, because being liked meant being imprisoned in a cage constructed by the mind of the other person, like a lightning bug some kid caught and put in a jar because he ‘liked’ it. This disliking or liking would stick in Marvin’s mind like flies stick to flypaper, all these noisy annoying flies making the tea kettle boil hotter. It made Marvin sick to his stomach to think about it.

            “Is this your first time at a meditation weekend?”

            A woman was talking to him. Her name was Charlene. She was nice. But that’s how trouble started, thinking everything is okay, treating that gut feeling as something wrong with you instead of the flashing yellow light it really is.

“No,” Marvin said. “Is it your first time?”

The logistics of talking are easy. Be a mirror. If they say hello, say hello back. If they say what do you do, recite your job description and ask for theirs. But all the while, flies fill your brain like it’s a rotting carcass, the noisy clutter ringing in your ears until you can’t hear anything else.

Charlene continued talking but Marvin was having trouble listening. She stopped, waiting for him to say something. Marvin felt like he’d been herded into a cattle chute that led to the slaughterhouse and he and this woman were going there together.

“Want to walk outside?” he asked. She looked at him as if assessing his intentions.

“In the meditation garden, I mean,” he said, and that seemed to assuage her concerns. They slithered between folks congregating in the kitchen and slipped out the back door where a gravel path meandered between shrubs and under trees. They entered that path as if going somewhere together. The garden was tiny, not much bigger than Marvin’s apartment, but it was carefully designed to create distinct spaces, only a few feet apart, that cohered like little self-contained bonsai parks. They moseyed from spot to spot like visitors in an art gallery, but the flies buzzing in Marvin’s head were getting louder. And then, as they rounded a corner, he heard them with his ears, too.

“Oh,” Charlene said, stopping. On the ground in front of them was a dead robin covered with angry flies. The angry buzz of the flies grew louder as if the flies feared there wouldn’t be enough dead bird to go around. The flies were like prisoners with an arm around their plates and eating as fast as they could. The buzzing in Marvin’s head grew louder, too. The dead robin and her entourage of flies was a sign, a correspondence between the inner world and the outer world. It was the Tao. Charlene pointed at the little bird corpse.  

“We should be mindful of death. Then we won’t put off meditating because we never know when death will take us.”

  Marvin started to take issue with her assertion that we never know when death will take us, but checked himself. Suddenly, he felt like Charlene was annoying him. Suddenly, the weight of her annoyance was so great it almost made him tip over. Suddenly, the breadth of her chest, her low hips, and her short legs reminded him of a robin. Her robin-ness felt like an insult or a provocation.

“We should get back inside,” Charlene chirped. “The next session will start up soon.”

They re-entered the building and slithered through the kitchen again back to the meditation room. Other people were assuming the lotus position on their cushions. The din of noisy flies was deafening. Marvin had trouble catching his breath as he sat on his cushion and tried to look like everyone else.

                                                            #

It was 5:30 and the Saturday session was over. The group would return tomorrow morning for the Sunday session. Sitting on the meditation cushion for a few hours had quieted the flies. They still filled Marvin’s brain, but they were asleep. He walked gently so he wouldn’t wake them. Charlene was checking her phone when Marvin approached.

“Want to meet for dinner?”

She hesitated as if surprised, but quickly said yes, a smile on her robin face. They picked a time, 7:30, and a place, the Italian restaurant in the old neighborhood south of the university, not far from Marvin’s apartment. It also was near where she lived, she said.

“It is? Where do you live?” he asked. She gave him the address, adding, “It’s within walking distance of the restaurant.”

Marvin felt the tea kettle in his chest simmer.

“See you then.”  

As he left the building and went to his car, the flies were stirring, but he shushed them by singing a little melody in his mind. When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along.

                                                            #

 Marvin was pacing back and forth outside and looking at his watch. At 7:15, Charlene came out the front door of her tiny brick house that probably was considered nice when it was built back in the 1930s. Nostalgia gave the university neighborhood character otherwise denied low-income housing, as if the people living in these old houses were a better class of victim than someone in a housing project.

“Hi,” he said. “I came early so I could walk you to the restaurant.”

Charlene smiled. The flies exerted pressure in Marvin’s head, but their wings were still. Charlene was wearing lipstick. She liked Marvin. It occurred to Marvin that this might be a nice dinner date. It could be a pleasant evening. Perhaps that’s what the Tao had in mind. It was nothing to Marvin either way – he would simply follow the Tao as it unfolded.

Charlene launched into a blow-by-blow description of the mundane events of her week, the way people do when they think you care, a monologue requiring no response from Marvin. It reminded him of his mother. He didn’t like that. Charlene had been better when she was quiet. All her talking was like someone splashing water in your face when all you want to do is float in the ocean. Then she said, “I’m actually glad you came to walk with me. I was thinking maybe I should drive to the restaurant instead of walking. There was another murder last night. Did you read about it?”

“No.” Marvin’s answer was literally true. He never read news. News was just clutter, the hell of other people. Marvin felt the tea kettle start to boil. The flies were waking up, rubbing their eyes, compound eyes, each of which consist of 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes. Thousands of flies, tens of millions of eyes looking and looking and looking.

When they passed an alleyway that cut between this block and the next one over, Marvin took Charlene’s hand. He nodded.

“This is a shortcut.”

Charlene wasn’t looking at the alley. She was looking at Marvin, forming an opinion about Marvin holding her hand. This kind of behavior was typical of most people, wasting time imagining motives instead of looking for signs. People typically insist on being clueless, even when surrounded by clues.

 Charlene followed the gentle tug of Marvin’s hand like a horse bridled as they slithered down the alley together between empty boxes and garbage cans. There was a broom leaning against the wall, as if someone had started to clean up the clutter and then abandoned the task. At the end of the alley, next to a child’s bicycle, was a dead rat, coated with a mass of flies walking back and forth unhurriedly across their booty, sated from a round of feeding, waiting until they became hungry enough to do it again.

“Oh,” Charlene said, squeezing his hand. She was reacting to the smell. Marvin saw that she had no appreciation of the beautiful intimacy of the flies crawling over the dead rat. Charlene was a stupid robin. The lipstick made it worse. Marvin pulled her through to the end of the alley. Across the street was a run-down public park with an empty playground where a flock of starlings strutted about, pecking at the ground. Beyond the playground were the woods. 

“If we cut through the park,” he said. “We’ll be there in sixty seconds.”

He pulled her with him and she followed without resistance as if they were dancing and he was leading. As they approached the playground, the starlings rose in mass like dark rain returning to the sky. Barely a beat later, the flies in Marvin’s head released and rose with the starlings, and Marvin felt his eyes roll back in his head as he felt himself disappearing into uncluttered emptiness.

                                                            #

   Marvin got out of bed and made coffee. Some kind catharsis had happened in his sleep, a dream he couldn’t remember, as if he’d cleaned out the garage and each tool now was hanging in its proper place. Henceforth, there would be nothing but order and contentment. That always was his thinking when he drank coffee in the morning. Today would be trouble-free, an expanse of happiness stretching like canvas the Tao would paint. And it wasn’t even dawn yet.  He sat on the couch where he always sat and began humming a tune, and words came to mind to go with it. When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin along. It’s funny how songs stick in your head for no reason at all.

Marvin heard sirens in the distance, coming closer, now coming down his street. He went to the window to look and watched blue lights flash as they passed and then trail into darkness. It was a sign, a mustard seed that no doubt would grow into a great tree. Marvin heard the voice of his mother – make yourself useful, clean up the garage – bounce around in his brain. He willed it away, like releasing a balloon into the air, a balloon that eventually would land on some street corner to wait for a victim. Marvin remained at the window, sipping his coffee. After a few minutes, he saw a glimmer of light in the east, and then a sliver of orange peeking over the horizon, the Tao replacing night with day, yin becoming yang and yang becoming yin.

A fly buzzed past his face. Marvin’s eyes followed its flight to the window sill where it landed. He slapped at it, but the fly was too quick and escaped. That was the Tao for you.

This story appeared in Omens: An Anthology, published by Antimony and Elder Lace, 2021

Chloe’s Knot

Mike Wilson

David sorted through his theory as he drove them to the restaurant. The theory concerned gender difference. Inspired by a little weed and armed with his otherwise useless philosophy degree, David had concluded that men cognize women as possessing a discernable indiscernibility. This wasn’t a Zen koan, like the sound of two hands clapping, it was a literal description of a cognitive experience akin to seeing a figure through an opaque shower door. To the objection that his theory was a sexist social construct, David’s response was that it was not an ontological axiom – he wasn’t postulating that women actually were in some way indiscernible. And David had even come up with an explanation for this phenomenon. As in physics, where either momentum or location of a subatomic particle can be measured, but not both simultaneously, David hypothesized that the measuring instrument – in this case, the human sensorium – was responsible. He had no idea how the sensorium was responsible, or whether a sensorium in female-gendered bodies similarly perceived a discernable indiscernibility in men. But what else could it be?

“Watch out!” ​

David’s slammed on the breaks, barely avoiding a rear-end collision.

“Sorry about that,” he said to Chloe. She put a smile on it, like a good date would, but looked shaken.

David pulled into the other lane and resumed driving as if nothing had happened. Soon the unsettledness of the near-accident dissipated like fog burning off. Prompted by his nose, his eyes turned to Chloe. She was wearing more perfume tonight than before. He felt like a dizzy bee in a bouquet of flowers. She noticed him looking and responded as if it were a cue to make conversation.​

“I hear the restaurant has vegan on the menu.”​

The first two times they’d gotten together had been on the cheap – coffee during the day, a drink at a bar early one evening when she couldn’t make a night of it because she had book club. He’d felt slighted, but she’d said she liked being with him and touched his arm in a way that encouraged, so on the spot he’d asked her to dinner and she’d said yes. He was even wearing a tie tonight.​

“Are you vegan?” he asked as he switched lanes.​

“Not strict,” she said, smiling as if he’d said something brilliant and penetrating. “I eat cheese.”​

She was seated in his Audi like she wanted to be there, dressed to kill in a short skirt and silky beige blouse. He took a deep breath and resolved to turn off his brain, enjoy her company, and, hopefully, get laid like normal people did. He turned the steering wheel hand-over-hand. The parking lot was full.

“It’s crowded,” she said, as if danger lurked. ​

“I made reservations,” he replied, swooping in to rescue her.

She was acting girly, making it easy for him to feel manly, helping get him out of his own head. He appreciated the assist. They’d shared information during the earlier dates, but he hadn’t mentioned the so-called anxiety disorder because he’d never agreed with the diagnosis, though he took the medication prescribed by the doctor.​

A parking spot was empty near the front door of the restaurant like the gap in a child’s smile after losing a tooth. David maneuvered over and eased his car in, observing that the process seemed sexualized. Was this the mind seizing the reins of the sensorium or the sensorium seizing the reins of the mind? He didn’t know whether his head or his body was in charge. The head-body dichotomy. There’s no away around it, if you’re honest. He glanced at Chloe to see if she had an inkling that random thoughts were running amok in his brain. Under parking lot lights shining through the windshield, Chloe looked like a man wearing lipstick, an image she dispelled when she turned and smiled at him, like she understood. That made David nervous, too, because he didn’t know what she understood. His necktie felt tight, so he stuck his finger inside the knot and pulled it away from his throat. He turned off the ignition and they got out and went inside.​

The hostess found David’s reservation in the computer and they followed a different girl carrying menus to a booth. The menu girl began a song-and-dance identifying their team of servers – one person to bring the water and bread, another to take their order – as if the meal were a gustatory vehicle with its own pit crew.​

“Could you bring us a wine list?” Chloe asked. Her voice was commanding, like the sound of a Winchester rifle being cocked. The menu girl left to get the wine list. Chloe’s face softened, a flower opening to the sun. David wondered whether he’d taken too much medication before the date. He’d thought he would need it.

“Do you have to work tomorrow?” she asked.​

“No.”​

“Good,” she said, as if she’d just written his name on the tag of a Christmas present. The menu girl was back with wine lists, which they studied while waiting for her to finish the “specials tonight” rap.​

“Can I start you off with a glass of wine?” the girl asked.​

Chloe ordered white, he ordered red. When the wine came, along with a basket of bread, he toasted to the evening they were about to have and took a sip. It tasted good, so he took another, feeling encouraged, the way he sometimes felt when reading Hegel and suddenly getting a real feel for the dialectical method.

Then he looked at Chloe and saw a pellucent bow around her throat, shimmering like a hologram. A question he couldn’t articulate flashed in his mind like a neon sign. His entire nervous system itched as if he’d taken poison. She noticed him staring at her neck.

“You can see it, huh?” she whispered, lifting her chin and tilting her goblet. He watched her swallow, the wine pulsing down her throat like the gyrations of a belly dancer. The bow disappeared.​

“It’s gone,” he said.​

“What’s gone?” she asked.​

Her voice was different, now, rounder than the rustling whisper that had said you can see it, huh? Had he imagined that whisper, imagined the bow? Clearly, there was only skin at the hollow of her neck.​

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He nodded, wondering if his medication was interacting with the alcohol.

“I thought I saw a bow around your neck,” he said. He cringed at how stupid his words sounded.

“Really?” she said. Her eyes widened. “We just read a story in my writing class about a woman who had a red bow around her neck. This is so . . . Jungian.”​

David assumed by Jungian she meant coincidental, like Carl Jung’s ideas about synchronicity. That was something he liked about Chloe, how she effortlessly went back and forth between girly and intellectual. He wondered whether she was familiar with Hegel.​

“You take a writing class?” ​

He took another sip of wine, adopting the proposition that alcohol would make him better rather than worse. He half-listened as she talked about her writing – it sounded aspirational rather than something she really did – and then she started telling him the story about the bow on the woman’s neck.​

“The husband wants to remove it, but she won’t let him. They marry, have a child, but she never takes off the red bow.”​

“Why?” he asked.​

“The bow represents something important about her that she keeps to herself.”

She stopped as if that should be a sufficient explanation. But seeing that it wasn’t

sufficient to him, she added, “It’s something unknowable to the husband.”​

A discernible indiscernibility. Was this evidence for his theory?

“Sounds archetypal,” he said, demonstrating his knowledge of Jung, “like a fairy tale.”​

“Actually, it is. A fairy tale, I mean.”​

He reached for a roll and put it on his bread plate. It occurred to him that their table was an altar, the bread and wine sacraments. his wine glass a chalice in an occult ceremony. Suddenly everything was Jungian.

“How does the story end?”

“She lets him undo her bow and her head falls off.”​

He choked on his wine, then wiped his mouth with his napkin and asked, “Why does her head fall off, for Christ’s sake?”​

“People say the bow may be a reference to women who wore red ribbons around their necks during the French Revolution to show solidarity with victims of the guillotine.”​

He didn’t know what to say. Chloe reached into the basket and took out a roll. He watched her pull it apart, releasing a warm, yeasty aroma that reminded him of other warm, yeasty things. His sensorium definitely had seized the reins. Or was it his mind?​

“But actually,” she said, smearing butter on her roll in an erotic, if not obscene, way, “women have worn chokers for thousands of years.”​

The tone of her voice was one he hadn’t heard before, not girly or intellectual or the Winchester rifle being cocked or the whisper he thought he’d heard. It was witchy, like she was leading him into darkness. It was his turn to speak.​

“Was that to make themselves attractive to men?”​

Chloe’s facial expression told him he’d made a faux pas. She bit into her roll and chewed. He watched a tiny lump slide down the line of the throat as she swallowed, hypnotic, like a pocket watch swinging in front of his eyes. Then she smiled again. She was giving him a pass – he’d been judged, but his violation excused because he was a juvenile she could redeem.​

“Sumerian and Egyptian women wore jewelry around vulnerable parts of the body, like the throat,” she said, “because it gave them special powers and protected them.”​

“Protected them from what?”​

“I don’t know.” But the accusation in her eyes said she did. David sensed the collective guilt of patriarchy falling toward his shoulders and slipped aside before it landed.

During the salad course, Chloe described chokers and neckwear worn by women through the ages, taking it through the Renaissance up to modern pornography with bondage overtones, a topic she seemed remarkably well-informed about. While they ate their entrees, Chloe summarized the history of men’s neckwear, starting with ancient Pharaohs and the Knots of Isis around the necks of mummies and finishing with the neckties of CEOs.​

“Ties are a badge of power for men,” she said, pointing to the very tie he was wearing, “but it could be something else.”​

“What do you mean?”​

She described an energy called kundalini that she said was coiled like a snake at the base of the spine. When the snake tries to slither up the spine, she said, it gets snagged on the way by the attachment we have to our bodies.​

“Yogis raise the kundalini to the crown of the head,” she said, “and it makes them enlightened. Ties choke off the energy before it gets there.”

“So if we loosen our ties, we’ll become enlightened?’​

Chloe looked at him as if he were a dolt.​

“Truth is a dangerous thing,” she said. “The structures of society and the economy depend upon keeping everyone ignorant.”​

She began holding forth on Marx and class struggle. He let her talk without interruption, bathing in the moonlight of her intellect, his eyes involuntarily dropping to her breasts, looking for the outline of nipples pressing through the thin fabric of her blouse, but the restaurant lighting was too dim to illuminate what he knew was there. He recognized that he had stopped listening and was in a trance, so before she noticed and said you’re staring at my breasts, he forced his eyes back up. But instead of looking her in the face, his gaze settled on her throat and he saw it again. The bow. It was tiny, almost transparent, and he had to be very still or it faded. But if he was careful, if he focused his eyes and concentrated in a certain way, he could see it.​

“You’re staring at my neck,” she said.

Her words broke his attention and the bow disappeared.

“Sorry,” he said, prepared to be chastised, but her smile was flirty, as if her antitheses was rubbing against his thesis and there might be synthesis later. His heart pounded like a big bass drum being softly struck.​

#​

They finished dinner and went to her townhouse. She took him by the hand and led him to the bedroom, flipping the light switch that turned on lamps on night tables on either side of the bed. But the room seemed brighter than two lamps could make it. David looked at the ceiling and saw the mirror.

It was huge. He pondered the logistics of installing a mirror that big without cracking it. Butterfly anchors wouldn’t suffice – the mirror had to be secured in the ceiling beams to hold that kind of weight. David felt Chloe’s hand on his face, and watched in the mirror as her hands wandered over his body and slowly undressed him. Once he was completely naked, she told him to tie his necktie around his neck.​

“Really?”

She looked at him, which he took as yes is there a problem? He did as she asked, excited by his own vulnerability, not knowing where she was taking him. When he was knotted up, Chloe smiled her approval. Then she opened the top drawer of her dresser and took out a red scarf. She undressed herself, and when she saw how he was watching, slowed down, turning it into a tease. After everything was off, she tied the red scarf around her neck.

They sat on the bed and kissed. The tie and the scarf became part of their foreplay, exotic undergarments, something to loosen and tighten and slip fingers inside of, as if their throats were a second set of sexual organs. They managed their momentum as long as they could and then she rolled over, raised her knees and opened her legs. He slid in, and she grabbed the ends of his tie and pulled, choking him.​

“You do it, too,” she said.

Supporting himself with his elbows, he pulled at the ends of her scarf until it circled tight around her neck. It was a race to the finish, either orgasm or passing out, as they pounded against each other at one end and choked each other at the other, two link sausages that couldn’t break apart no matter how hard they tried. They climaxed together, letting go the neckwear, and endorphins from oxygen rushing into his head combined with those from the orgasm was like being catapulted into a state of non-ordinary consciousness. ​

They lay on the bed, recovering. Everything was dreamy, except David’s throat hurt. He studied Chloe’s reflection in the ceiling mirror. Her eyes were closed and she looked sated. Then he saw it again – the bow on her throat.​

Very carefully, he turned his head and looked. The bow was transparent, delicate like blown glass, but amorphous like plasma, and he was only inches away. He reached to her throat and touched it. The bow felt like spooky gelatin.​

“That tickles,” she said, not opening her eyes.

The bow represents something important about her that she keeps to herself. That’s what she’d said at dinner. David felt an overpowering desire to untie Chloe’s bow.

The knot was small and it moved away when he touched it, as if his fingers were coarse. Holding his breath seemed to help stabilize the knot. He took hold of it. He sensed that she realized what he was doing and wasn’t going to pull away. She was going to let him undo her bow.​

“Are you sure you want to?” she asked, her eyes still closed.​

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he said, something he hadn’t known until he heard the words come out of his mouth.​

“Will you still want me?” she asked.​

“What do you mean?”

He spoke gingerly because the bow was starting to fade. He slowed his breath and the bow became substantial again, like a radio station signal becomes strong when the dial is tuned just right.​

“You want the meat sack,” she said. “You like the meat sack.”​

Meat sack? Her gibberish was interfering with his concentration. He caressed the knot, gradually enlarging the opening, and worked his finger in.​

“After it’s undone,” she said, “will you love me?”​

Her eyes still were closed and when she spoke her lips didn’t move.​

“Yes,” he said.​

It was the yes of a dream. He realized that he was asleep. She was asleep, too. They were dreaming together. Chloe’s knot was a dream that could only be untied in a dream.

“Are you afraid my head will fall off?” she asked.​

He could tell that she wasn’t afraid – she was worried for him. He tried to block her voice from his sensorium as he worked his fingers deeper into her knot, now so familiar that it seemed part of himself. The knot was almost undone.

Suddenly, light exploded from Chloe’s neck. The room filled with countless faces expanding in every direction like corridors of mirrors, faces male and female, faces both and neither, inside a giant mind that that had no discernable boundary.

“Chloe’s Knot,” by Mike Wilson, first appeared in The Phare, Nov/Dec 2020

https://www.thephare.com/chloesknot

            She set the timer on the treadmill for twenty minutes and dialed up a speed of 2.5 miles per hour, a comfortable walk. Her only goal was to have shown up at the gym and done gym things to demonstrate that she was the kind of person who took care of herself because she mattered, regardless of whether she could wear Lululemon leggings without calling attention to those extra pounds that wouldn’t go away no matter how many salads she ate.

            As she paced, her eyes wandered to the free weights, where only the ambitious ventured, and then to a particular man who was cute but not unattainably handsome.  After watching him for a bit, she decided to name him Dave, because he was working out in a Dave Matthews Band shirt. He was striking enough to deserve a name, the way a shell on a beach is striking enough to pick up. You look at it, see if a relationship develops, and then feel that tingle in your breadbasket that signals conversion of some formerly indeterminate piece of the environment into mine. Dave’s biceps looked like softballs as he curled the heavy dumbbells. He wasn’t bodice-ripper ripped, but ripped enough that you would mention it if you were describing him to your BFF.

She saw Dave squat, dropping the dumbbells to the floor with a clang, and then sit on a padded bench to recover. His eyes were focused down, as if there were a bug crossing the floor in front of him. She felt like a voyeur, hiding in his closet, waiting for him to undress. He had a manly face with a dash of feminine vulnerability in the eyelashes and a shock of black hair so thick he must shampoo it with Miracle-Gro. She had black hair, too, but fine, not coarse like his. What would their children have? Her hair or his? The boy should have his, the girl should have hers. It would be a thing people would remark upon.

She imagined this Dave coming over and introducing himself on some lame pretext, like Hi I’m Dave. Did we go to the same high school? She would call him David and from that moment forward she would never call him anything else.She would become the only person in world who could call him David, except perhaps his mother, a way of marking him with her scent, delineating his relationship with her as different from all other relationships he’d ever had. On another level, she’d be exercising control over him so that, beneath appearances in which she allowed him to strut the way a man wants to, David would subconsciously understand that this relationship was co-equal from the get-go. She would praise David’s fitness, contrasting it with her own need to lose a few pounds, and he, without thinking, would blurt I like women who look like real women!  Then he would blush, embarrassed to have shown his cards so quickly. She would hold David’s eyes for a moment, the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, letting him know she knew, letting him know it was okay, but he would continue to apologize as if it were about him objectifying her. Fine. She would pretend along with him. Buy me lunch and we’re even, she’d say. David would grin at his unexpected luck. They would agree on a time to meet at the little Mediterranean restaurant near the gym. Years later, it would become the story of how they came to have their first date. In recounting it to their friends, the story would never be the same. David’s versions would have him increasingly smitten in each retelling.  In her versions, she would alternate between remembering herself a little smitten with him and coy about it or miffed at his impertinence but pleased after he accepted her challenge and it worked out so well.

She watched as Dave rose from the bench and carried the dumbbells to the rack, thoughtfully returning them to the correct slots. She bet that Dave was the sort of guy who never missed a day of work, probably some sort of mid-level manager with a bright future. She imagined having a flat tire, phoning David, then apologizing for disturbing him at the office. No, don’t call a tow truck, David would insist. He would dash to wherever she was, and she would sit in the car, smiling as she watched David change her tire in the pouring rain, ruining his pants and dress shirt. But then, when she gave him a new suit for his birthday, they would share wine in front of a roaring fire, unable to finish the bottle because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. David would pick her up, carry her to the bedroom, and she would be light as a feather in his muscular arms, whether or not she’d managed to lose those extra pounds. His brown eyes would be merry as he whispered in her ear this is really what all that training in the gym was for!

Her gaze followed Dave as he went to a different weight bench, one with uprights for doing bench presses, and placed a barbell in the upright supports. She watched him systematically load stupendously large plates on each end of the barbell. Then he reclined, wiggling between the uprights, and reached up to grasp the barbell. He lifted it, groaning just a little, and slowly lowered it to his chest, then pushed it back up, his face becoming red. He did it again, settling into a rhythm of up and down. She imagined David having that kind of rhythmic strength in their marriage, as life added weight plates of responsibility to the family barbell – a home and a mortgage, the first child, then the second. David would work long hours to advance his career and make a name for himself so he could realize his inner potential and so they could afford private schools (Catholic or secular? They would go round and round on this), music lessons, braces, and a mortgage on a bigger home. Yet he still would find time to coach their son’s soccer team and drive their daughter to piano lessons. But on their anniversary, David would insist that they deposit the kids with the grandparents and slip away somewhere for a few days, maybe a cabin near Asheville or a beach in Bermuda, and work be damned!

 She watched as Dave struggled on his last rep to press the barbell high enough to return it to the supports at the top of the upright, but he managed. He lay on the bench, breathing slowly, his eyes closed, his shirt wet with perspiration and hiked up above his waist, exposing his navel – he was an outie – and a hint of definition in his abs. His legs were spread so that there was a little opening between his workout shorts and his inner thigh, nothing improperly visible, just mysteriously inviting. She imagined the basement in their second home, part of it converted by David into a workout room, and she would be descending the steps with glass of lemonade for him and find David sprawled out, just like that. She would assess the situation, decide what he needed. Lemonade and more working out? Someone to tell him he’d done enough? Her hand sliding up his thigh, the first bar in a song of surprise sex? Her decision always would be the right one, because she would know David better than he knew himself.

She watched Dave wiggle out from under the weights and sit up. He stood and began unloading the barbell, carefully returning each weight plate to its proper place in the storage rack for the benefit of others who would bench press after him. David would be that way, careful, always thinking ahead, starting a 529 plan for the kids’ college education while they still were in kindergarten, buying enough life insurance, making sure there was gasoline in the gas can for the lawnmower.

Some random guy, far more overweight than she was, joined Dave at the weight

bench. Dave’s face lit up. She couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but Dave’s face softened. Socializing agreed with him. Men were too linear and purpose-driven. They needed time to relax now and then, especially someone who worked as hard as David would. She would make it her self-imposed duty to guide David to his me time, giving him the permissions that he wouldn’t give himself. She would fix brownies for his poker night group and make sure a case of beer was chilled for them to drink while they smoked their smelly cigars. She would buy David that rod and reel he’d circled in Field & Stream. She wouldenroll him in that fantasy tennis camp with retired pros in Florida. On their tenth anniversary, she would insist that they fly to Wimbledon, where David could watch a stupid ball batted back and forth, enthralled, while she watched David, her body thrumming with contentment, Mother Teresa doing a good deed.

The overweight guy left, and now Dave was eyeing the kettlebells. But no, that wasn’t what he was eyeing at all. It was thegirl, over by the kettlebells, bending over, her ass up in the air like McDonald’s golden arches. She could see that sort of thing happening to David after the marriage, too. Given that the basement would have a ping-pong table and a couch and TV for the kids, there would only be room for a weight bench and maybe an elliptical machine, so David would keep up the gym membership. He would be at the gym one day – no, one night when she was out of town on a trip with the kids to visit her mother – and he would be lonely, exercising to take his mind off missing her, his anchor, when a hussy would bend over the kettlebells and wave it in his face, planting the idea in his mind, then bending over again the other way to show off her cleavage, as if the skanky top wasn’t enough already.

Would David resist an opportunity like that? She would have tried to keep herself up, but with diapers to change, and a house to take care of, and a full-time job to boot, she would barely keep her head above water. Even David, with his feminine vulnerability, was a man, and to men, sex and love were different things. Men didn’t go to strip clubs because they loved the woman in a G-string – they loved the boob job she was shaking at them. David would tell himself it wasn’t infidelity because it was just sex, just this once, a fling that wouldn’t mean anything. But once the hussy got her talons in David, she wouldn’t let go. There would be a second time, then a third, and it would become routine. David would start slipping around, downplaying the moral significance of what he was doing to something not much different than sneaking a cigarette, more than offset by his contributions as a provider.

She would notice a change in David’s behavior. He would pass it off as pressure from work, inventing some stressful situation in the office he knew she would be unable to verify. His lovemaking would change, too, becoming more urgent. Initially, she would welcome it as a re-quickening of desire for her. Then she would notice that it didn’t feel right. It would be as if he had something to prove. She would never dream that it was because he had something to hide. And finally, on the fated day, at the appointed hour, the lurking abomination curtained in shadows would leap into the broad daylight of her innocence and stare her in the eye.  

It wouldn’t be because she’d spied on him. She could never spy on David. What was marriage but the ultimate gift of trust? And it wouldn’t be that one of her friends had spotted them together at a restaurant, because they would have been careful. Careful David, so careful about the life insurance, so careful about gas for the lawnmower, and so very careful about betraying his wife.

The hussy would be the one who slipped. It would be a text or, God forbid, a sext, sent when David was separated from his phone, taking his morning shower, she still in bed, reading the Sunday paper, sipping coffee, content, secure, having a blessed day. His phone would be on the bedside table, and when she heard it buzz, she would pick it up, mistakenly thinking it was her phone because their phones were identical because they’d bought one of those packages where the whole family got new phones plus a deal on the monthly charge for the first year.

And there it would be. At first, she wouldn’t understand. Maybe it was spam, some phishing ploy, like the Nigerian Prince always giving away $7 million dollars in broken English to random email addresses. But then it would sink in. She would feel pain knife through her midsection, the knotting of her stomach muscles. When she heard the shower turn off, she would return his phone back to its place on the nightstand, and when David came out of the bathroom, naked as a jaybird and with a face as guiltless as a newborn, she would summon a smile, something any woman can do in an emergency if she has to, a necessary survival skill in a patriarchal world.

For days she wouldn’t mention what she’d discovered. Each time he left the house on another purported errand – he’d be going to the hardware store a lot for reasons he never could quite articulate – she would smile, holding back the tears, thinking of the children. She couldn’t tell her girlfriends, because they would say cut off his balls and call an attorney. Finally, when the kids did an overnight with one of the grandmothers, she would confront him. David wouldn’t deny it. He would cry, as if he were the victim, and beg her to forgive him. He would promise that it would never happen again.

She would insist that they go to counseling. The counselor would be an attractive and intelligent woman, earnest, caring, who would try to appear neutral but secretly would be on her side. Counseling wouldn’t work, though, because trust, once broken, can’t be restored. After putting it off and putting it off, finally she would make the call to the attorney and her life would become a cliché, a trope, a line in a twangy country song. She would be just another single mom waiting at the mailbox for a pittance of child support. David would remarry. The children’s new stepmother would be the very hussy who’d destroyed Daddy’s marriage and broken Mommy’s heart.

The treadmill slowed, signaling that her twenty minutes had expired. She stepped off, leaned on the handlebars for support, and looked at Dave. He was swinging the kettlebells up in the air, then down between his legs, not a care in the world. She shook her head. You think you know someone.

She turned, not looking back, and walked out of the exercise area. As she pushed open the door to the women’s locker room, she thanked her lucky stars that she’d dodged a bullet. There was no hurry to lose those extra pounds.

This story by Mike Wilson appeared in Apeiron Review, Spring 2020