There wasn't time to be displeased. The shotgun got off, and we were married. Before the wedding, I had been courted by the shotgun. But as I say, she got off when the jury heard about her tortured childhood—the mother who never removed the mask, the mother whose face rotted and festered behind the mask, the mother who wasn't a shotgun at all. So the shotgun I had known got off and left town, looking for a vegan breakfast and a fresh start. And I was married to the wolf.
The wolf, born in Chernobyl in 1988, is very old for a wolf but rather young for a husband, and he behaves accordingly. He wheels about the house in a wheelchair and enjoys gardening, but he is quick to temper and wishes to keep a shotgun in the house.
Honey, I told him, my last relationship with a shotgun ended with a bang.
He snarls.
Honey, I tell him, it wasn't really a bang. She left me, it was painful, now I'm married to you.
He snorts.
My husband bathes in the tub like any other husband, but of course he is a wolf, and radioactive. His childhood, like the shotgun's, was traumatic. Sometimes he smokes a cigar in the bathtub, trying to forget.
My own childhood? Not relevant to the marriage, although I should mention I'm an alcoholic. I stopped drinking for a while when I was with the shotgun, but now I'm back into it, and glad.
My husband, he isn't easy. I'm not saying I'm the victim here, but you know what I'm saying. The rooms here in our house are small, our house is small, some even call it a shotgun house. But we cheat with closets and live north of most places. And really, I'm done with the shotgun.
She's long gone, and my husband's like this: reading a newspaper, one actually printed on newsprint, legs crossed, tail resting on my arm because he's sitting beside me. I've pulled him from his wheelchair and he's on the rose colored sofa we inherited from his Aunt Harriet, who some—the same who whisper of our shotgun house—say was a dog.
Our fireplace moves a little closer and I uncross my husband's legs and he doesn't mind because the radioaction took away their feeling, and I put a shawl over his shoulders and this is what my husband is like, reading to me in a language I cannot speak or understand.
Honey, I tell him, time is like this. Time is a symptom, and so is toothpaste.
I am drunk. He snarls.
© 2014 Jaclyn Watterson
