Manuel Gonzales - The Miniature Wife - and Other Stories

She sat up in bed but couldn’t find her husband, then found him lying (“Poor exhausted bunny”) on the floor at the foot of the bed, the surgical mask still wrapped around his head, twisting around to cup not his mouth but his ear. If she squinted at him, he looked scrubbed and fresh and like a boy playing doctor, but she had to squint.

How funny, she thought. How absolutely wonderful.

Moving through the house to the kitchen, she noticed the cracks in the wall were bigger today than they had been the day before. They would have to move soon, or else repaint.

In the living room, the dog was barking, and though she couldn’t hear him, the force of his barks made her chest feel rubbery and beat upon, and so she moved quickly through the room, crouching behind the couch so that its cushions, already torn beyond repair, would absorb the brunt of the animal’s timbral and violent voice.

There were still dangers, she decided. And if her husband continued to refuse to send the dog away, something else might have to be done. For their own protection.

Once she had made it through the living room and into the kitchen, forgetting for the moment that her ears were protected, she moved gingerly among the items on the counter and the appliances in the cabinets, lifting pots and pans by two fingers instead of four, cracking the breakfast eggs the old way, wrapped in nonreactive plastic towels, rolling them under a heavy, padded, cast-iron pin so that the shells were crushed fine, would not be as noticeable when eaten. She had become so adept at her routine, so careful, so quiet, that it wasn’t until she dropped a dish that she remembered being protected, remembered her husband’s tiny knife, the sharp pains, and now the blessed, blessed silence.

She smiled.

The first task, she decided, was to take care of the dog. She was reluctant, but she couldn’t rightly avoid the dog forever.

She wrapped herself in her afghan. She tightened her hood. She wore her mittens. The dog had chewed the goggles into a useless mess, so she approached him with her eyes closed, rapidly blinking at intervals to check her progress, his movements. Grabbing him, she covered his snout and threw him outside, and then beat him back with her voice until, with what she imagined was a whimper, he scuttled off. Better, she would explain to her husband, than cutting its vocal cords. No need to be cruel, she would explain. Can’t leave the poor thing defenseless.

Then she made the bed.

She did so stepping carefully over and around her husband.

She hoped her screams hadn’t caused him serious harm. His skull had always been soft, delicate. Normally he wore hats, hats she had knit for him out of a fibrous copper material he’d brought home for her after the last time he had gone scavenging. He should have worn one of his hats before he performed the operation. She should have reminded him, but in her excitement, she’d forgotten all about it. All about him.

She finished the bed and then looked at her husband, still on the floor, still breathing, but only barely, and she worried.

In an hour, she thought. If he is not awake in an hour, I will wake him.

She fixed herself a cup of coffee, and moved to the back porch. So much time had passed since either of them had dared step outside that the vines had brambled — perhaps a defense mechanism — across the patio furniture, so that it took her not a few snips with her shears to cut out a space for sitting. She carried the afghan outside with her, just in case. One can never be too careful. A swooping, cawing blackbird. Claps of thunder. Yelling, rambling children. Very real dangers, all of them. But, in truth, she didn’t expect to use the blanket and was, after a moment, quite frustrated at herself for being so cautious, for bringing it along at all. It snagged on the thorns.

After a time, her coffee went cold. The wind picked up and was, no doubt, howling. She could feel the sound of it against her cheek. Rather than cover herself, though, she gave up on the morning and, back inside, sat down to wait for the afternoon.

Her husband looked vulnerable, like a pile of leaves. He still hadn’t woken, but his lips moved slightly when she moved him from the floor to the bed. She tied him there, anchored him to the bedpost. She removed the mask from his face and covered his ears with the pieces of foil left on the nightstand. Too little too late, she thought to herself. She set his head against a pillow and pulled the sheets to his chin. She pinched his nose, hoping he might wake. He had been against the operation from the very beginning, and now she was afraid he might have been right. They had torn through twelve notebooks arguing back and forth about it, until, finally, she had worn him down.

She lightly touched the bruises on his cheekbone, bare patches high on his face, which had not been quite protected by the mask. She mussed his hair, careful not to pull any of it out. He had been against the operation, but he hadn’t offered any other viable solutions. They had already replaced three windows, and this in just the past week. The dog could not be placated and had become so harmfully loud, neither of them could approach him without suffering bruises and cuts. Children from other neighborhoods and looters, with all their shouts and threats, their powerful voices shuddering chips of paint and loose pieces of drywall onto their heads — the world had become wholly unpredictable and loud. She and her husband had to do something.

She looked at her husband, at his bruises, his cuts, his now misshapen nose. It had been such a nice nose. She touched his cheek. She pressed the flat part of her palm against it. She pushed his head gently to the side. She could get a mirror, she thought. She could find her compact in her purse and hold it under his nose, like she had seen someone do once in a movie, although in the movie the man was trying to make sure a person was dead, and she would be trying to make sure a person was alive.

She shook him softly by the shoulder. She wanted him to wake up. She wanted him to wake up and to make her believe everything was going to be okay. She pressed her hands into his stomach, leaned into him, not too much, just enough to make him open his mouth, to force air out of him, to elicit even the smallest breathy rasp of his voice. But even if he had made a sound (and maybe he did), she wouldn’t have been able to hear it. And then the reality of this — she couldn’t hear anything at all — slowly became real to her.

My, I’m jumpy, she said.

She said this thinking she should at least be able to hear her own voice inside her own head.

Anxious, she said.

Anxious, she said again.

Anxious, she said. And again. Louder. And louder. Straining her throat. Yelling, screaming.

She closed her eyes and cupped her hands over her ears as if she were in a concert hall and yelled as loud as she possibly could. Tried to imagine what her voice, so loud, might sound like.

Nothing.

She opened her eyes then, and, seeing what was left now of her husband’s face, she let out a small gasp and then covered her mouth, afraid even the softest sound might ruin him beyond repair.

Housework, her mother always said. Tidy up your house, tidy up your soul.