I yawned, stretched, and exited the master bath, thinking: It’s so nice to be able to keep the bathroom door open around a woman, and my ex-wife was flying above our bed. Technically, legally, it’s just my bed now except for twenty-nine minutes last night when we revisited well-explored territories. We knew it was wrong and confusing—discussed that openly while I sucked each one of her toes, ran the backs of my fingers along the insides of her thighs.
As early morning burst in between each burnt-amber bamboo blind, there she was, my ex-wife, dipping and drifting near the ceiling, the popcorn finish combing her disheveled hair. Even at age 42 the woman had no grays. Impressive, but not quite as impressive as the flying. Dangling from my robe that she donned out of habit, the ties tickled my chin.
“You can fly?” I asked and felt immediately stupid. She has a way of doing that to me: turning me foolish.
She told me it had started only last week. She instructed me, “Don’t freak out.” Deeper, more authoritative but somehow younger, her voice was strangely different from above. Over the years I’d been so accustomed to its rises and falls, lilts and growls but now, from the ceiling, her words sounded wider, more complicated. “I’d had a large glass of Chardonnay after work last Wednesday—”
“Another promotion?” I wondered why the Chardonnay. My ex-wife is not much of a drinker.
From the ceiling she nodded, a promoted woman, her hair swinging like a dirty blonde blade. She told me that after the second sip, she rose slightly from her sectional couch. “It was strange,” she said, “but I felt it was in me all this time, waiting for the right circumstances for liftoff.”
Gravity did strange things to her belly and breasts—things that I thought were sexy, but would have made her self-conscious. Had she not been pressed against the skylight (the one I installed as a remorse present, after a particularly disappointing infidelity), I would have taken that woman again. My penis wanted to join her on the ceiling. Because I’ve said the wrong things at the wrong time, over and over again, I knew to keep that one to myself. And then she smiled her sideways smile reserved for what I consider her most beautiful moments, the one that hooked me her first day as my file clerk.
“I’m shocked that this is possible with you in the room. I mean, what do you think?” She shook her head, still with that smile. The stubble on her legs looked like a freshly plucked chicken.
“It’s incredibly sexy Karen, just not normal.” Again, I knew this was a foolish response. Of course it wasn’t normal! “Want some waffles? I make breakfast these days—been really getting into baking.” In our fourteen years of marriage, most of it an emotional tornado, she’d done one hundred percent of the cooking. More than anything at that moment, I wanted to serve her. “Biscuits? Or some oral sex, maybe? Champagne?”
She looked suddenly sad. Weighted down, her legs gained gravity. With her back on the ceiling, she sat, looking like a little kid on a big chair.
“We should have painted this ceiling yellow,” she said and her back began to sink closer to the floor. Soon, she hovered just above the nightstand. “I suppose you should have done a lot,” she said as her feet—oh, those toes—as delicious as gumdrops, dropped to the carpet. “Time for me to go.”
She fished my boxer briefs from the rumpled sheets. Tucked inside were her practical panties. A reflex, she tossed my underwear into the hamper and then cradled her head, as if it was too heavy for just her neck to hold, and shook it slowly back and forth.
“Want to take anything with you?” I asked, pointing towards the china cabinet full of figurines from our honeymoon: a glass dog, a still windmill, three chickens pecking their version of the ground.
She looked sadder still. “No,” she said. “Thank you.” She lived in a month-to-month in the warehouse district. After climaxing the night before, she had told me she kept it as empty as possible.
She was mostly dressed, but one nylon trouser sock still lay on the floor. She sat on the bed and grabbed for the sock.
Gently, I touched her back, walked my fingers up the staircase of her spine. “Baby,” I told her, “you’ll be fine.”
She lifted from the bed and didn’t glance back at me, trailing in one hand, a butter-colored silk scarf in her wake.
______
Guest Editor: Rebecca Evanhoe was born in Wichita, KS. She earned a BA in chemistry from the University of Kansas, and an MFA from the University of Florida. Her work appears in Harper’s Magazine, Gulf Coast, Vice, Gigantic, Bat City Review, and elsewhere.
Photo credit: {Charlotte.Morrall} / Foter / CC BY