He calls her his bad dream. He says it’s funny, a nickname, and right there’s the tale of the tape.
He buys a parrot because he says he’s lonely and wants someone to talk to. He says it’s like an ulcer eating him inside out, how hollow their space has become, how it echoes and cusses.
He takes up painting. He always wanted to be an artist and now he can be. He uses garish hues. He mixes them into a psychedelic goop and the canvas looks assaulted. She knows the feeling.
For their Anniversary he brings home a sheet cake seamed with lavender frosting. He retells the story of how they met so many years ago at the hospital café when he’d asked where the soup crackers were and she’d told him and then they’d talked and she’d said she was a nurse because she couldn’t be anything else. He cuts her a small piece, knowing she’ll never eat it. He asks her questions, knowing she won’t answer. She hasn’t spoken since that night in the parking lot at the hospital. “We can’t help you if you don’t tell us,” the female officer said, angry and offended instead of gentle and kind.
After he’s gone to bed, she sits in the darkness. When she was a girl she had to sleep with the light on. Her imagination was brave and brilliant then, capable of conjuring up the most horrendous creatures that lurked in the hall and breathed through the slits of bedroom door. The truth is so much like a lie, she thinks.
Her husband doesn’t paint anymore. It lasted two days. He said it was a stupid idea. Now he does crossword puzzles.
She misses the colors so she clicks the little white spin dial on the cord and waits for the bulb to heat the viscous glob sitting in the water like a headless bullfrog. Beside the cake, he’d given her the lava lamp as a gift and now she wants to see what shapes it will make, if there’s anything worth staying up for.
Len Kuntz lives on a lake in rural Washington State with an eagle and three pesky beavers. His short fiction appears in over sixty lit journals including juked, Mud Luscious, elimae and also at lenkuntz.blogspot.com.