Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

I felt a sudden chill and pulled the blanket over my head. That’s the way they bring horses out of a fire, I remembered. If they can’t see, they won’t panic. I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.

I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.

I was thinking about what it would be like to live somewhere so beautiful. Would it fix my brain?

Here lies one whose name was writ in water,

It pleased her that you could see Jesus on the cross if you leaned a little out the window. This was a good sign, she thought, and was not canceled out by the fact that her son no longer believed in him.

The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck,

You’re so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.

How is it, people ask. “Not bad,” he says with a shrug. “Only vaguely soul-crushing.”

People keep telling me to do yoga. I tried it once at the place down the street. The only part I liked was the part at the end when the teacher covered you with a blanket and you got to pretend you were dead for ten minutes.

Sometimes at night I conduct interviews with myself. What do you want? I don’t know. What do you want? I don’t know. What seems to be the problem? Just leave me alone.

There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

Advice for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart … it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.

I am interested in bankrolling you. But I only have $27 in checking.

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.

At first the flames are beautiful to see. But later when the fog wears off, they come back to find only ashes.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

When you pick up one piece of dust, the entire world comes with it.

I was hoping your happiest memory might include me.

“What is the worst thing that ever happened to him?” her sister asks her. And the answer is nothing ever has. “That’s the problem,” she says. “He’s just a nice boy from Ohio. He has no idea how to fix something like this.”

It sounds like a sitcom, the wife thinks when she hears this. But where to put the laugh track?