Waking Up

My wife of five years called my name from the kitchen and of course I couldn’t hear what followed. The dryer was running, the TV had obnoxiously loud commercials, and she was quiet to begin with. She’d given me two beautiful blonde babies with full heads of hair and clean bills of health but this was one small complaint, that she would begin talking at any moment, no matter her proximity to myself, and expect me to hear and respond as if her words could pass through solid walls. At this particular moment the television program resumed and I felt no obligation to leave my prostrate position on our very comfortable couch. If my response were important enough she would surely pop her head around the corner and ask her question a second time. I acted like I didn’t hear and became engrossed in TV again. Planet Earth. Fungi. The way microscopic spores could blossom into deadly colorful form fascinated me. The sped up images of forest floors becoming cities of towering toadstools. My wife called my name a second time and again her question was drown out by the ambient noise of our small three bedroom townhouse she’d bought before we met. The two- and four-year-olds were napping upstairs to the sounds of rainforest. We still used the baby monitor for the little one because she liked to poop immediately after waking (something she must’ve inherited from her old man) and was still in the early understanding of solo toilet use. Again I heard an inflection from my wife behind the low undulations of the dishwasher. Is she really going to make me get up and walk to her when she’s already on her feet and two steps away from simple communication? It seemed such a small innocuous task for her to step around the corner and speak to me and it was starting to upset me that she didn’t think about my own comfort on the couch and that maybe I didn’t want to get up just to hear whatever it was she was trying to ask just to immediately retreat back to my reclining position. Why do people do that? Did she enjoy exerting control over me? It had been a happy marriage but with the addition of kids it seemed we’d stopped looking out for each other and prioritized the children and their well-being above all else to our relationship’s loss. Divorce’s impact on children was widely recognized but the turmoil of an up-and-down relationship with partners who slowly gave up on one another was less clear. My own mother and father had never yelled but instead employed a deeply passive aggressive warfare where they constantly made each other feel bad for sharing kindness with each other. This was why I hesitated to leave the couch. I didn’t want to surrender control. She needed to learn that if she had something to say to me she must compromise and be in the same room to do so. Distant thunder rolled from the baby monitor. The two-year-old slept with a blankey and her thumb in her mouth. During the next commercial I would rise and go to the kitchen I told myself in a moment of compassion. It was the right thing for me to do, even if the wife failed to see how it pained me. I never wanted to be one of those pack-mule husbands who shoulder the whole weight of their wive’s unpleasantness with blank numbness and ever longer working hours. One of those beer-bellied, khaki-panted, polo-shirted fucktwits who bent to the every demand of their hardheaded wives. And it was my greatest fear that that was what my wife was turning into. A person who wanted everything catered to her and whose way was the only one worth understanding. The two-year-old gave a little cough and put her thumb back in her mouth. I saw the fireplace below the TV turn blue for a second and back to orange. I had never seen it do that before so I watched for a second longer. The flames curled around the fake logs in arcing licks of flame but things seemed normal. The documentary showed the largest mushrooms on earth which grew to the size of immature maples. It looked like Siberia or the South Pole or someplace remote and untouched by humans. The fireplace changed colors again, this time a deep purple which I wasn’t aware fire could be. There must be some toxic burnoff somewhere in the logs or gas line. I began to rise to turn off the set when the wife called again. I sat still and listened to her jumbled voice retreat to ambience. The fire erupted into a magenta to teal gradient and I was transfixed but horrified. I wanted to run to turn it off but I could not move. Just then the wife walked into the room but I didn’t look in her direction as she spoke. Her question was if I had taken the garbage to the curb. I hastily spat out that I had forgot and asked if she’d ever seen the fire that color but she was already gone. Fire inverted and it began falling instead of rising, flames came from the top of the fireplace down to the logs and disappeared. I called for my wife. She did not come or answer. The fire no longer seemed like fire. It fell from the chimney in waves of light like cloth in breeze, fluttering from some invisible force.

I opened my eyes to sunlight slicing between a crowd of legs onto me. I was on my back in the lush grass of a manicured lawn. There were only bits of dark images connecting where I lay to where I had been. I didn’t remember the day or my wife’s face or the names of my children. I had no children. I was a 21-year-old college student on his way home from class.

‘Are you okay?’