The Miniature Wife: And Other Stories

Author:MANUEL GONZALES
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Literary, Fiction
ISBN: 9781594486043
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

Barbara likes birds. She watches them. She’s a bird-watcher. She attends birdwatching events. She’s rather devoted to them. She donates money and time to the Audubon Society. For a while, before Mark made her give them up, she owned parakeets, four or five of them. At one point, they had babies.

Once she told me she wanted to change her name to Bird, change her name to Barbara Bird. She told me that and then she laughed and then she blushed and then she said, “It’s dumb, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid name,” and I told her, “No, it sounds nice,” and she said, “Mark says it’s dumb.” She said, “He’s probably right.”

I’m not fond of birds, personally. For what it’s worth, they’re not fond of me, either. Most animals aren’t, but birds are at times aggressive in their dislike.

They have dead eyes, is the thing that bothers me most about birds. They have dead eyes and they seem to me lifelike but lifeless, or maybe it’s the other way around, or maybe it’s nothing like that at all.

But still, her attraction to them gave me some amount of hope. Not a large amount of hope. Nothing has given me anything more than the smallest amount of hope. But still. The birds and their dead eyes: Are they so different from me?

Dead-eyed me.

Lifelike yet lifeless me.

I can tell you now, though, I can tell you now with confidence, with utmost confidence: It is not a hope worth hoping.

The thing is: Barbara likes birds, maybe she even loves birds, maybe she even likes me. But she cannot love me. She simply cannot.

I know this now. I can accept this now. This is a basic fact of life that I can now accept.

You could argue that her being twenty or thirty heartbeats away from death, you might argue that the broken form of her laid out awkwardly across my desk, you might argue that the misshapen state of her really leaves me little to no choice in the matter.

But that’s not entirely true. It’s not entirely true that I have no choice in this. It’s not entirely true that there are no options left on the table for me.

There are steps, there are a number of steps I could take. At least let’s recognize this: It’s my choice not to take these steps.

Her husband is nowhere to be found. I can’t see him, in any case, glancing briefly around my space, or in any of the cubicles near mine. Granted, there is a lot to see. Granted, there are a lot of bodies to see, and it’s possible he’s one of them. It’s possible he’s one of the many, covered, perhaps, by one of the others.

I am, admittedly, fuzzy on the details. Let’s just say that my command of the details is not very commanding.

How about, let’s say, of the details, what I know is this: Things did not go according to plan.

Or let’s say that things did not go according to my plan.

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