2.
 At home, Bill's wife Phoebe was cooking lasagna. In a peeve of unkindness, Bill thought she looked like lasagna. Immediately he reproached himself, held her shoulders from behind, placed a kiss on her cheek.
"Don't splash yourself with the grease," she admonished over her shoulder. She was too busy to look back, but affectionately shrugged her shoulders against him.
He found the newspaper and hobbled to the farthest corner of the living room, to read in his easy chair with the gunwale armrests. There, in his puddle of sixty watt light, he felt safe. He could digest the day's recitation of horrors feeling sympathy, but also a bland impatience to reach the sports and comic pages.
"Don't get too comfortable in there," Phoebe yelled, "the trash needs to go out and dinner's almost ready."
Bill hunched his shoulders to drive the sound waves of her voice away. They had married right out of high school. Their two sons by now had wives and seemed ever on the verge of having children of their own. The empty nest was a circus tent after along show, a quarter century of daily struggle, and now had only two aging lions left looking at each other through the empty popcorn boxes of years flown by.
Even as he licked apencil and decided to try to crossword puzzle, Bill thought in the back of his mind about the girl today, and about how he had (was it just yesterday, or 25 years ago?) dated so many pretty young high school girls.
"Come and eat!" Phoebe said.
"I'm not hungry!" he said.
"Your ribs are showing. You better come and I give you double portion this lasagna."
"Later!" he said. He had to work hard to push his annoyance away to let the crosswords come into focus. She sounded like a mother, not a wife. I broke away from my parents, made my own mother stop sending food packages every week because it pissed Phoebe off. We were rebels, Phoebe and I. It was her and me against the world. We were going to have a house and have kids and jobs and be young forever.
He scratched his cheek and found there, to his surprise, a tear. He sniffed and wiped it with his sleeve. Bitter vetch, the crossword said. What the hell was a bitter vetch? Sounded like his life.
"I give you six months to live," Phoebe's disembodied voice cautioned.
"Put lots of Parmesan cheese on the pasta for me," Bill said, rising to join her for dinner.
He watched sports all evening with what he hoped was a stony expression. He grunted when she flittered about straightening things. She went to bed early. He slept on the couch that night.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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