By Mary Magagna
My perfect wife has a friend I’m about to meet. This friend predates me, has known my pristine, porcelain doll from grade school, maybe kindergarten. Will the friend recognize from our expressions the bliss my pulchritudinous prize and I share now we are married and one? Will she envy our life—our domestic domicile regulated to a harmonious tranquility? “Not an ill word spoken. Not a teacup broken”: our motto stitched in crimson crewel by my unsullied’s hands on ten pillows placed strategically throughout our enchanted abode.
We are at the door to her friend’s house, seven steps up from the walkway, waiting for her to answer the bell. The door is recessed; the landing narrow and stingy. As my good lady rings, I glance about. The friend’s yard is ill kept, an expanse of rough grass bordered by beds of petunias and lobelia, a disastrous riot of pinks, reds, and blues. The door opens inward, and the friend steps through, embraces my wife as I stand to the side, forced to watch this exchange that excludes me.
My esteemed wife places her cheek on her friend’s face and blows an air kiss into her ear. When she lifts her face and sidles away, I am face-to-face with her friend and, and there’s something on her face! It’s gross—round, the size of a dime, raised, dark brown—and it inches up and sideways toward her nose when she smiles. A mole. Three or more hairs protrude from it, splayed right in its center. I gasp at the sight, and its hairs move with the breeze from my breath, animated as if appendages—arms or legs wafting about—seeking contact. In my horror and haste, I jostle my pure seraph who loses her balance. Her body flails, her arms grasp at the air before she falls backward and tumbles down the stairs, smacking the back of her head against the sidewalk at the bottom.
Furious with her friend for giving me such a start, I mentally ready myself to give her what for but she pushes past me and step leaps down to attend to my darling dearest. Not to be outdone, I jump steps down as well, readying to pick up my flawless gem and cradle her in my arms.
“Don’t move her!” the friend shouts. “She may have a spinal injury. Move her and you risk paralyzing her!” Her friend is so adamant that the whiskers on that thing on her face begin to point and wag, reminding me of when a teacher would shake her finger at me for misbehaving. “I know that,” I shout back. In the meantime, the friend dials emergency services who get to my beloved bedazzled in seconds flat. They carefully log-roll her, slip a plastic stabilizer under her, and secure her to it. My one and only is out cold.
Off to the hospital we speed. I have to fight to ride in the back of the ambulance with my sweetest pea. Her friend insists that I caused the incident and that the circumstances are suspicious.
“He pushed her!” she declares.
“No such thing. It was an accident,” I protest, and to prove my case I produce a diagram of the scene with arrows indicating the angle of the slope, gravitational speed of my precious pearl’s downward trajectory, and the hardness scale of the concrete sidewalk—all facts that exonerate me sufficiently with the medics. I am allowed in the back with my gazelle and her ghastly friend whose intention to separate me from my elegant springbok are now baldly exposed. I have found an adversary in her. The battle has commenced.
The afternoon progresses. My quiescent quince remained in a critical way. Her friend and I are vigilant at her bedside, neither leaving the other alone with her. On to evening to night. The medical staff pleads with us to leave, get out of their way, we aren’t doing any good. My wife’s friend grudgingly suggests I come home with her to sleep, a gesture I accept as my due. She drives and, as oncoming car headlights strobe through her vehicle, I can see that her deformity has a third dimension, a dark shadow cast by the abnormality, its spectral whiskers elongated when the lights hit her face. She turns her back-lit face toward me as we near her home. She’s monstrous.
“I only have one bed,” she says. I offer to sleep in it while she takes the couch.
I wake the next morning on the couch with the light of day seeping into the living room. I get out of bed and dress. In the kitchen, my wife’s friend is drinking coffee. With a nod of her head and a gesture with her eyes, she indicates a cup and motions toward the coffee pot. I pour myself a cup, hot and steaming. My wife’s friend asks if I am ready to go to the hospital to visit my perfection confection. Her lesion crawls toward and recedes from her nose with every spoken word. How do I endure?
The doctor says my delicious delectable has regained sense, her regal composure reasserted. “My fabulous excellence, my reason for existence…” I burst in and out, but stop short. She has some things on her face, two amoeba-like, purplish blue stains under her eyes that crinkle when she smiles. My wife’s friend stands behind me. My wife looks from me to her.
“What is it?” my bruised derelict dares to ask. “What’s wrong?”
My wife’s friend brushes past me to embrace the corruption that was my wife. “Nothing, dearest, he’s leaving,” and the leggy whiskers on that thing on her face concur, wave a fluttering goodbye.
I file for divorce and thank my lucky stars my marital exit is uncontested and swift. I am once more settled in precision with my next Mrs. when a knock sounds on our door. I open it and see a box of chocolates on the welcome mat. Not an aficionado myself, I offer them to my winsome wife, who accepts gratefully, thinking they’re a gift from me. Daintily consuming one, she falls to the floor and froths. I am aghast at the sight and seek to absent myself from the fracas, but my departure is detained by an oafish officer of the law, called by a neighbor who heard the piteous bleating of my fallen ewe. The badged muscle proclaims me the culprit in my damsel’s unforeseeable demise and arrests me.
Several of my marriages have ended in fatal accidents—coincidences all—but I am prosecuted as if my curtailed connubials are indicative of my character and intent. I am convicted of murdering my most recent woeful wife and committed to a fortified respite for the criminally insane where the waifish warden is not unsusceptible to my charms. She has made me a trustee and never fails to shed a tear when I regale her with my injustices. Together we stroll the corridors or climb the lofty watchtower to make languid love. The regimentation of the facility and the artful accommodations my judicious jailor afford me are keeping me from disquiet, but there are so many creatures here with things on their faces that I don’t know what chance treacheries might yet befall me.
* * *
Born in Rock Springs, WY, and living in Berkeley, CA, Magagna’s writing bends to the left and leans to the right. She is a fan of alpine flowers and open spaces, has a requisite cat, paints, draws, and writes, watches actions films on small screens, turns to the endings of murder mysteries before getting started on the book, and reads The New Yorker from back cover to front.
Willow Springs Review; Pulp Magazine; Awakenings Review; Colossus: Body; Berkeley Times; and Crone’s Words have recently published her writing.
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