Sublime

I thought of my wife, the dark stain of her nipples, her mouth open and ribbons of sound coiling out.

One of my favorite stories is about an old woman and her husband—a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims.

As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.

You never live with a woman, you live inside of her, I overheard my father say to my brother once, and it was, indeed, as if, when peering into the mirror, you were blinking out through her thickly fringed eyes.

(If you are reading this story out loud, make the sound of the bed under the tension of train travel and lovemaking by straining a metal folding chair against its hinges. When you are exhausted with that, sing the half-remembered lyrics of old songs to the person closest to you, thinking of lullabies for children.)

You wanted, he says. You wanted and wanted. You were like this endless thing. A well that never emptied.