Wife Life

When your wife doesn’t come home one night, there is reason for you to fret.

I should have made the world of it, engraved the sky with markings of red and gold, emptied the air out of my lungs, turned over every blossom, every tree, every needle. Instead I did not. I waited. In the darkness. She never came. I never told. Even without her, I still think of myself as a married man. Years after, I walk at night like a nocturnal animal knowing that darkness means no one can quite see you. No one knows I am a wifeless man except for, well perhaps, the candles. A candle flickered and my moth-like personality flew to it, a magnet in the evening light. The next moment, I found myself in the interior of a church – one of those bone churches. The walls none other than skeleton upon skeleton, whitish-ivory, firm and cold. In one swept I was hypnotised. And night after night a procession of strangers and strange figures approached me. I made it a practise: the house of terror became my own. Finger to bone, bone to finger and little by little I knew them all, skeletons, appearances, dimensions, skulls and sizes. And she. A skeleton in the church.

“My wife, when you disappeared, I pretended not to notice. But now I’m standing and grinning here like a stupid fool. People might notice I am now a wifeless man. I think the guy at the coffee shop already knows, he used to see us both but now we are only one. You are beautiful – your bones are beautiful, your skeleton sublime. I have found you, my wife.”