My Husband
Written By: Adara Schwartz Each night, my husband sleeps on his back with his hands crossed over his chest, as though he is in a coffin.
My Husband
Written By: Adara Schwartz
Each night, my husband sleeps on his back with his hands crossed over his chest, as though he is in a coffin. He sleeps this way because I position him. I tuck the corners of the sheets under his body, fold his arms, then kiss his stubbled cheeks, although he can’t feel my lips on his skin. He is completely senseless. Each night, I keep our marriage lukewarm by kissing him excessively, just after I serve him dessert, and when I do I slip a miniscule but powerful sleeping pill straight into his open mouth with my tongue. When he collapses sideways into the couch, I drag him upstairs to bed and tuck him in, place a cold kiss on his face. Each night, I lay the length of my body beside his, noting our measurements in my pocketbook. I’m a good wife. I’m almost there.
My husband doesn’t have time for me. On weekdays he is concerned with making himself visible for a promotion, and on weekends he is swinging a club about, padding leather, tailored shoes over damp astroturf with other husbands from the office. I worked in a lab, once, before him – I tested police evidence for drugs, and spent my days dreaming of a lover who would let me devour them. I met my husband on a train. It went out over the water and as I gazed wearily out the window at an endless sea, he tapped me on the shoulder to tell me how taken he was by the back of my head, and now that I’d turned around, my face was even better than he’d imagined. I closed my eyes and saw an entire life in the black behind my eyelids; saw running animals and confetti and spit and cradles. I took my husband, who was not yet my husband, to the toilet and made him paint the mirror over the sink white with his desire.
When my husband stopped paying attention to me, we had been married for six months. Slowly his touch retracted until I could no longer remember the sensation of his fingers over my mouth. The beast who had once possessed him, who had flipped me inside out, became a meek shadow of its former, whimpering for seconds or a third beer. My brain felt mossy, as though I had left it somewhere damp, and upon returning I had found it a different shade, softer and smelling of mould. My husband invited his boss to our house for dinner, and I made up my face, slipped into a crimson dress that hugged my thighs and my waist, made a cherry pie and blew a kiss into the batter before serving. My husband touched his boss on the shoulder at the end of the meal. When we were alone again – when it was just him, and I, and the silence in our home – he left me skin starved in a war torn kitchen, my dress and my makeup firmly intact. I picked a piece of cherry skin from between my teeth. I said to my husband that night in bed: I have a headache, and my husband said nothing. I said to the moon: I have a headache, and the moon said that pain was only a problem for those who did not know how to stand it.
I wiped down my tablet press and took a trip to my old lab one weekend, whilst my husband dozed in the afternoon sun with the other husbands, all of their guts bloated, full of wheat bubbles. For three months, I shrank my husband with the pills. My husband became languid, I noticed soon after – sloppily climbing the stairs, one leg crossing drunkenly over the other on his ascent, coming down again by way of sliding on his backside, his knees too weak to carry him. He spoke very little but seemed to need me more, touching my face how he used to, or, at least, trying to; his fingers often fell slack before he could fully grasp my neck between them. I have a headache, he wailed to me, and I turned the volume on the radio up.
The day I swallowed him was gloriously wet. I had never felt so close to my husband, so knotted with another person. Bullets of rain pinballed over our roof, and drool leaked from my open jaw onto the sheets, washed and untucked. My husband frantically gripped at the headboard, his palms slipping with sweat. Hairy thighs, all slick with fear, sliding feet first down my throat.
Adara Schwartz is a fiction writer and poet from London, with work appearing in Oddball Magazine and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her short story, Praying to the Aliens, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. A graduate of Curtis Brown Creative’s selective novel writing course, she is currently querying her first novel. She runs the Substack newsletter Deep Dream, publishing prose and flash fiction. She lives and works in London.