Acting "As If"

Acting "As If"

"Sometimes," the woman says to her husband as she butchers a chicken for supper, "when I think about who I am, I hate myself and want to commit suicide."  She has set the butcher knife down to wrest the skin from a leg and thigh.  He picks up the knife, holds it handle toward her.  "Here, let me assist you."  He smiles slightly, but his eyes look serious.  A knife is too much pain, she thinks, afraid, and then for half a moment, considers stabbing him rather than herself.  Instead, she continues cutting up the chicken.  She says nothing, but inside, a pack of devils dance in her heart, laughing gleefully and poking sharply with their pitchforks.  The dinner is delicious but nearly wordless.  The man listens to his music, reads the CD covers.  Says something she misses but doesn't ask to have repeated.  The woman takes potshots at the devils in her heart.  But there are so many of them.  I will act "as if" I love him, until I do again, she tells the demons, but they only laugh.  She lies awake all night, her husband's words running through her mind in an endless loop, the fiends jabbing and jabbing.  In the morning, she gets up, fetches his paper and slippers, makes his coffee, his eggs, bacon and toast, places three dark chocolate kisses on his napkin and puts some Bach on the stereo, his favorite music.  She answers quietly when spoken to, but volunteers no words of her own.  After he leaves for work, she builds a recumbent snowman in the trees, carves her husband's features onto the head, and squatting alone in the spruces, pisses on his face and watches it melt into a yellow puddle.


Mary Stebbins Taitt
090311-1323-1c; 090311-1139-1st