husband and wife

a short story

It wasn’t very long into the walk when the wife noticed that the husband wasn’t trailing her anymore. She looked behind her and found him a ways back, ambling slowly towards her and tucking his hands within his elbows.

“You look cold” she yelled to him.

“It’s alright” he replied back, the shiver in his voice obvious.

“Are you sure? We can go back and get your coat from the car. We’re not that far in. I don’t mind.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine.”

She rolled her eyes. He always did this, ever since she had met him so many years ago. Pretending everything was fine when he was clearly suffering. It wasn’t the lying that bothered her; he was terrible at it and couldn’t keep a secret to save his life. It was the feeling that he didn’t have faith in her to help him, that he didn’t trust anyone. Early on in their relationship she tried to help him with it, viewing it as minor flaw in an otherwise decent person. But she couldn’t make any progress. The whole thing stemmed from trust issues with his long-dead parents or something like that, it was never really clear. The closure he needed was stuck inside a clump of ashes in an urn on their fireplace. A long time ago his comment would have made her upset; now it was just a minor annoyance.

“Alright”, she replied back. She waited for him to catch up to her. As he got closer she could see his breath clearly and hear his teeth chatter like sledgehammers during street construction. They kept walking.

The trail was covered with orange leaves of all different shapes and sizes. The trees they had come from were barren. The cold wind made their branches swoon back and forth. It was a grim overcast day, the sky flirting with whether it should rain or not. A flock of crows cawed in the distance.

At the top of the trail the view was stunning. The wife could see the valley below and the river and the big city with its skyscrapers and, off in the distance, a large mountain range. If she squinted she could have seen the street their house was on, but she had left her binoculars in the car. The wife wanted to take in the view for a longer time, to reflect on herself and how the year had gone so far, but was interrupted by her husbands constant teeth chattering and shivering. They walked back to the car in silence.

On the drive to the grocery store they fiddled with the radio. He put on the classical music station; she wanted NPR. They pressed their preset buttons back and forth, like a rally in a tennis match, before she sighed and turned off the radio entirely. A draw.

“Any preferences for dinner?” he asked her as they pulled in to the parking spot.

“No, not really.” she replied, not looking at him.

When the husband came back to the car he reported back that none of the meats looked particularly appetizing to him and proposed they order delivery for dinner. The wife said that was fine with her.

They returned home as the sun began to fall, its rays turning the clouds from gray to pink. “Where were you? I’m gonna be late!” their daughter complained as the two removed their shoes.

“We were on that hike I told you about. You should have come with us, it was an amazing view.” said the husband.

“I don’t like hiking, it’s boring. I’m gonna go over to Cadence’s tonight.”

The husband tossed the keys to his daughter. “That’s fine. Bring the car back early, I need it for work tomorrow. And no parties.”

The daughter stumbled a bit catching the keys. “Yeah yeah.” She walked out the front door. 

“Have a good time!” the wife said to her daughter, but by the time she uttered this the door was already halfway closed, and the daughter didn’t hear anything.

They ordered pad thai for dinner. One of their go-to meals so long ago. In those times they would have grabbed two boxes of noodles from the takeout spot near them and a bottle of red and curled up watching movies on his couch. They would barely make it through the first movie before staring into each others eyes and falling into each other’s embrace, making love until the sun rose and the birds chirped. But that was a different time. Now they ate in silence sitting across from one another. In the brief moments that they made eye contact now there was a feeling of sorrow and regret and a strong sense that something had been lost ago, something that the two of them could perfectly describe if you pushed them to but could never bequeath a proper name. The table felt empty even though it was occupied. A blustery cold wind blew outside in the darkness. Inside the house a sense of foreboding lingered as they ate in silence.

After cleaning up the pad thai containers the husband went to the living room to watch basketball and the wife went up to her room to read her book. The wife fell asleep early, her glasses still hanging on to her nose bridge and the bedside table lamp still turned on.

The wife had one of her recurring dreams that night. It was a dream about when she first met her husband at Erica’s birthday party decades ago. But something was off about this rendition of the dream tonight. It wasn’t how she had remembered it. In her memories the husband and the wife had met when Erica dragged over the husband to her, saying the two of them would get along really well and then disappearing back into the crowd. He was tall and wore circular glasses and had short hair. She was charmed by his shy and sweet and slightly flustered manner of speaking. She thought it was cute. He thought she was the prettiest woman he had ever met. They locked eyes throughout the rest of the party and when he had to go he gave her his number and asked her out and kissed her on the cheek before dashing away. She had never fallen for someone that hard in her life and never would again.

But in the dream tonight it was all wrong. Erica’s party was void of people, only populated with used red cups and empty beer cans and half-inflated balloons. She walked through the empty apartment and found a man standing alone in the kitchen, his back turned to her. She called out to the man but he didn’t move. She approached him with great trepidation and tapped him on the back. The man turned around. It was her husband. His glasses were gone. His eyes were completely black and his skin was as pale as a ghost. He looked at her and smiled, his teeth rattling and falling out of their sockets and his lips so dry blood slipped out of the cracks. He opened his mouth to say something but only a harrowing inhuman sound emerged from it. The husband moved towards her and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. The wife tried to move away but her body failed to heed her instructions. When the husband planted his cracked lips on her cheek and his cold hands on her neck she felt something ethereal draining from her body. Not blood or saliva or piss or some other liquid from her body but something she had no definition for. The husband held the kiss for a long time and when he finally backed away she began to fall to the floor. She woke up in her bed in a hot sweat before the impact. Her cheeks were stained with tears.