The Husbands

by Holly Gramazio

But maybe it just implies that circumstances can ruin anything.

It has never occurred to her that the husbands might exist independently of their role in her life.

Every husband, she’s pretty sure, is someone that she might have met, somewhere, somehow, if she’d done things a little differently. Every husband is someone she might have enjoyed spending time with, and who might have enjoyed spending time with her.

every time I change worlds all my Duolingo progress resets.”

I want a life where I know where I’m going to be in a week. I want to…pre-order something. I want to buy an overambitious spice mix and then never open it and throw it out three years later way past its best-before date.”

“I check the news a lot,” he says, “but there’s never been, like, the megafauna are back, or Australia’s just won the World Cup, or the climate’s settled down and we don’t have to rinse out our recycling any more. Which is obviously a mixed bag because it’d be great to get to a universe that’s less fucked, but it’s comforting too, means we’re powerless against the forces of history so we might as well watch Mindhunter.”

There is a time, she thinks, at the start of any relationship, when the process of falling in love softens a personality, like wax in a warm room. And so two people in love change, just a little, pushing their wax figures together, a protuberance here smoothed down but creating a dip there. It doesn’t last long, the time when love can gently change who you are, and in the relationships that she’s visited over the last six months, the moment has long passed.

The lives that diverge the most are usually the ones with the longest marriages;

She doesn’t always like the new versions of herself, but they help her understand the edges of who she might be.