Motherthing

by Ainslie Hogarth

Remember that, Abby, vanquishing this depression is your true calling as a wife. Just like every woman in a television commercial has a true calling—kill the bacteria and save your family; buy the healthy snacks and save your family; use the perfume and save your family.

“He must be up here somewhere,” I mutter out loud, casually, as though a strange thing hasn’t happened, and it works because the things you say out loud like that are powerful. The semi-constant mutterings a wife makes about a husband become the truth: Nothing strange about those curtains being open and Perfectly healthy to sleep all day long!

The private alarm of losing track of a spider on your ceiling, that was what it felt like to be in a room with you.

Marie died a few months later, and I know it sounds crazy, but I’m sure it was because of the corkboard. Because what else is there to do but drop dead at that point? When you don’t even recognize yourself anymore, when the person you spent your whole life becoming is a stranger in a photograph and everyone thinks it’s funny that you didn’t realize you’re No One now. Unceremoniously absorbed by the great homogenous colony, the leaking, aching, voiceless elderly, looking and sounding and treated the same no matter what they’d accomplished before they started shitting themselves again.

Back into bed, fistfuls of blanket hoisted up to my chin, I pretend not to hear the shower curtain rattle gently along the bar, the bathroom door open and close and footsteps, bare, dragging, making their way down the hall and, from my count, stopping just outside our closed bedroom door. Then silence. Standing. The swaying un-still of a beating, living body, and my flesh crawls, relentless, all night long, can’t settle, can’t sleep, snatching only fitful, drunken bouts of half consciousness.

The salmon is staring at her now, watching her move slowly into its line of vision, hair hanging around her face like a broken net, all of her skin drooping straight down. It makes you realize just how much gravity has to do with the way your face has settled, how different you’d look if you walked on your hands your whole life instead of your feet: eyebrows halfway up your forehead, drooping into your hairline, top lip hanging open and showing your teeth.

Women on daytime murder shows are always strangled or stabbed or chopped up for no reason at all, except that they’re women, I guess, and to some men that means they deserve it.