There’s a woman. Her clothing is hanging loose like trash bags over her body which doesn’t seem plausible considering how large the woman is. It’s hot, the stink of her body would melt the face of anyone forced to approach and engage with her. Sweat pours down her face— what’s left of her hair is saturated, stringing, dangling in wispy threads from her exposed scalp as she walks into the center of a busy intersection as though she is starting a long peregrination. 

“You’re all not real!” She shouts at the top of her lungs. She screams at oncoming cars. They honk their horns. They are all children. Because at a certain point, everyone around the elderly becomes a child. Everyone you meet will eventually be younger. “You’re all not real! It’s not real!” 

They laugh, howling hyenas, concealed and tucked away behind their man-made metal while spewing their viciously concocted cachinnations. The pointing of their fingers. Mothers telling their children to look away from this old, ancient, moldering beast who stands in the center of that busy intersection pouring her heart out and whatever goop is left of her cognitive ability. The woman screams with such vituperation it will haunt those same children as they try to sleep at night. Those children will not understand why they are so haunted by the elderly, but deep down they will understand while shooing the thoughts away that the reason they are afraid of the rot is because they too know it will be their fates someday. They’ll ask their parents what was wrong with the woman in traffic. Their parents will tell them that the experience was nothing. That she was sick. Is sick. Was sick. Sickness is impossible for anyone to acknowledge when they have a good bill of health. But unfortunately, we all must come to terms with the fact that in the end, our shells won’t be able to contain the brilliance of our minds. But our minds are Finite. They will crack, tear, fester and eventually deteriorate the same as our bodies.

Then there’s a man. Yes. He is still a man even though he doesn’t feel like one most of the time. He’s sitting in a car close to the woman screaming in traffic, weighing the pros and cons of going home without her. The police will bring her back to him … they’ve done it before. Yes. Many times before. His knuckles are white. His face is steaming, sweat, rubicund. He watches that woman scream at the cars as they frantically try to drive around her. There are tears in his eyes. This woman— a stranger— but she is not. He tells himself that she isn’t the girl that he knew when they were both far younger. She isn’t that same girl that took off her brassier with one hand— making his heart palpate uncontrollably like it was going to implode within his chest. This woman— she kissed the back of his neck when his mother died. She told him that she loved him; that it was up to them to carry on his mother’s memory and that she lived within the little girls they created. This woman; she promised she’d always be there for him, in sickness, in pain, in life. This is what they’d promised one another with those sacred vows.

But she was lying. 

She was lying.

Because that woman standing traffic— the one that he’d held in such reverence, so much love— that woman isn’t the one that gave him his two children. That overweight, sagging, broken, tearing, bag of filth couldn’t possibly be the woman that the man gave himself to. 

No. 

She died.

She died.

But her body … this version … it has taken her from him. A monster. A monster he is forced to keep alive while he remembers the way things used to be. 

“You’re not fucking real!” She slams her fists against a car— a large red Jeep— standing in front of it while the woman sitting behind the wheel leans on the horn. The man gasps. He can’t take anymore. Even though she doesn’t look like his woman— smell like his woman— act like his woman— and there is nothing left to connect this old, decrepit flame to the one that burned so far back in the past. 

She is still his woman. 

He made a promise. 

He wipes the tears from his eyes and steps out into the almost drowning, excruciating heart of the heat. He allows himself to breathe deeply, taking in the scalding moisture of the air. The driver of the red Jeep is still laying on the horn as he approaches. 

“You’re not fucking real! You cunt! You’re not real.” He thinks about folding when his wife calls the woman a cunt … but she is still his wife. She is. There must be something left in there … there has to be something left. 

There’s something left in him, right?

He steps out onto the stage. The intersection is clogged like a bathroom drain in desperate need of getting plunged. His wife, screaming, crying, wailing— her vituperation a disgusting gasp of dragon’s breath filled with shit. Phlegm falls from her lips as she proceeds to spit at the woman who’s hiding behind the windshield, telling her children in the backseat of their car that everything is going to be alright. She’s on the phone now— the husband knows exactly the number she’s dialed. 

911.

How many times have they used that number? 

Miscarriage. 

He remembers it like it was yesterday. 

It was the first time he dialed the number. 

911.

His wife was bleeding, holding her stomach on their tiled floor. He remembers those white tiles … stained a pinkish red. He’d put that floor down himself. Abrading his knees and taking a day off work because of the swelling. 

That number seems to follow the elderly like the reaper. 

“You’re not fucking real!” 

Somehow, a memory mimicking that woman wailing on the bathroom floor covered in dead blood cells. She looked up at her husband; when she was still his wife. She looked up at her husband and said: This can’t be real. It can’t be real. 

They said it would be unlikely they’d have children. 

He and his wife had two of them anyway. 

What the hell does a doctor know?

A doctor told the husband that his wife would be lucid for another year at least. That she wasn’t going to get any worse. 

“You’re not fucking real! Cunt! Cunty cunting whore! How dare you!” 

“Honey?” The husband calls out; he can feel all those eyes staring at him like he is the unluckiest person in the world. But he wasn’t. He was the luckiest. 

“Who the fuck are you?”

When did her words become filled with such malice? 

He was the luckiest man alive when they married. These people sitting in traffic, mildly inconvenienced from their daily routines. They will never know the woman standing in the center of the intersection. 

They couldn’t know the way she used to look at him … the way that it made him feel. 

“Honey, please, we need to go.” 

“I said who the fuck are you!” She screamed, smashing him upside the head with her purse and the Husband felt blood begin to trickle out of his ear. His hearing aide, smashed to smithereens and he could feel that as well in confluence with the newly minted ringing that wouldn’t leave him alone. There were giggles, shocking awes, the shaking of heads as the traffic watched him take what his wife was willing to give. She wouldn’t give him love any longer— it was only this. Her fear for her own life in the presence of the man she’d married more than fifty years ago. He took that pain with pride, holding onto it because at least she was acknowledging that the two of them did, indeed, live on the same planet as one another. 

“Honey,” he said it in between her slashes with the purse.

“I don’t know you!” Her vitriol hurt, it didn’t feel good, but the man knew it wasn’t his wife that was saying the words. This version, this whatever, this Godforsaken monstrosity who only pretended to be her and could still claim to be her didn’t know what she was doing. Thinking. Saying. She didn’t know anything. “I said get the fuck away! I don’t know you.” 

He grabbed her arm. 

“Help! Help! Help me! I don’t know this man.” 

“Honey, it’s me. Please. Look into my eyes. It’s me. Your Nathaniel.” 

“That’s a stupid name! I don’t know you! Help! Please! Rape!” When she said the word rape the husband wanted to laugh because he knew how over dramatic his wife had been in the past. This was something revealing itself from below this version. A tangible piece of his wife’s old personality and it made him chuckle a little. Then, when he laughed, the rest of the crowd watching did as well. And he thought that unlike much of the watching, pointing, and staring that’d occurred when she was cussing in the middle of the lane earlier that this laughter wasn’t ill-tempered. That it wasn’t malicious— that those people were genuinely feeling for that unlucky husband that had been forced into the intersection to save his senile wife from getting hit by a car. 

“Get away!” But he didn’t get away. He held her arm and began to drag her back towards the car. 

She shook her head, stomping her foot and then wincing as though the simple act of stomping her foot like a child had put her in a great deal of pain. Perhaps it had. Those little tasks. The ones that the young do absentmindedly without thinking anything of them stop becoming easily accomplished when you reach a certain branch on the age tree. Her clothes were worse than he’d thought, covered in sweat, dirt, and grime. He’d have to wash her when they got home, and lord knows that was worse than her every three-day public outbursts. She reluctantly stepped towards the open passenger side door and sat down, bringing with her all those smells, liquids, and feelings of suffering. 

The police arrived; the husband waved them down and told them that everything was alright, and under control. He asked them to apologize to the woman and her children when they were done talking. That intersection, still, barely any cars trickling down it as the husband watched the police officer drive away, shaking his head and that husband knew what that police officer was thinking. 

Unlucky. 

He’d been lucky his entire life, and now, it was alright to be a little bit unlucky. 

He was lucky she chose him.

Lucky, they got married.

Lucky, they had two children that he’d call later and not tell them about his day. 

He was lucky. 

The husband was lucky. 

He sat down in the driver’s seat and started the car, blasting that cold air and rolling down the windows in the backseat to try and blow some of his wife’s smell behind them. 

A song began to play that caught his wife’s attention. She reached for the volume button, her hand worn and papery. The husband remembered when it was young and vibrant and he would place it within his own. 

Same as her lips.

Same as her hips.

“I think that possibly, maybe I’ve fallen for you.” That song, he closed his eyes and listened with her. And then that young hand touched his neck. “I think that possibly, maybe I’ve fallen for you.” 

He was a lucky man. He still was. 

“If I couldn’t have you, I’d rather be alone.”