The English Teacher's Wife

She checks the showtimes
While he grades papers

A movie at noon
Another at six

Two tomorrow

She’d like to see

Elliot’s looking at nouns

Waiting for them to introduce themselves

So they can have a proper relationship

Her husband is surrounded by paper

And pens

And pencils

And more pens

Black and red and blue pens

But he only uses the red

Professor Elliot Brattle

One t’ in the first name

Two in the last name

And the middle name is silent

Who knows what it is?
Even she doesn’t

She bought him a mug once

That he never uses

There aren’t many things he does use

Except a tone

And sigh

And a wayward glance

At the window

There’s a novel he’s writing

But then again, who isn’t writing a novel?

She has four novels she’s working on

And all of them

Are about wars

World War I, World War II

The Civil War

And a war she made up

Between the French

And the Canadians

His novel is about a child
They’re never going to have

Named Steven

And all the things Steven

Will never do

Because he’s never

Going to exist

Elliot tells her that he doesn’t feel comfortable

Writing fiction

That non-fiction is more his style

And so, could they have the child?

To make his work flow a little better?

But she says ‘No’
And she understands what this means

It means he’ll never finish the book

And he’ll hate her for that

But it also means

She’ll never be stuck with a child

Who belonged in a book

Instead of in her kitchen

Throwing pureed food
At the wall

He looks up from grading papers

And asks her what movie

She’s going to see that afternoon

And she says she’s going to see a comedy

But it’s the furthest thing from the truth

She’s going to see a documentary

About poachers

Because she loves watching movies

About people

Who hurt animals

Because then she can fantasize about hurting them

Without feeling guilty

For her own deep-seated violent tendencies

The other night, she grabbed a carving knife

On the way out the door

For her evening job

And wound up at the neighborhood playground

Carving an obscene word

Into the side of a swing-set

I am not a well woman, she thinks

Not at all

Her husband holds up a paper

And asks her to come over

So she can take a look at it

When she arrives at the kitchen table

Which serves as his desk

She sees that the paper—or packet of papers, as it were

Is really just several blank sheets

Stapled together

With the student’s name on top

‘Somebody handed this in,’ her husband says

‘Just like this.  Can you imagine?’

She takes the paper in her hands

And looks at the name on the top

Tess Tater—one t in the first name

Two in the last name

No middle name that she can see

And four blank pages

Instantly, she found herself liking Tess Tater

Liking her quite a bit

And she looked down at her husband

And he was smiling

Clearly, in spite of himself, but still—

Smiling

Then laughing

Then she was laughing

Then he was laughing even harder

Then she picked up a red pen

One of the many red pens

And wrote a great, big ‘A’ on the paper

And that only made her husband laugh harder

He picked up another red pen

And wrote a plus sign next to the A

And this rendered them hysterical

And she was on the floor of the kitchen

Holding her stomach

Trying to remember when the last time was

She laughed this

And then her husband was right next to her

Having fallen off his chair

Still holding the four stapled-together blank pages

With the A+ on it

And burying his face in her shoulder

The laughter burned down

Into embers of soft breath

And then they were just…

Laying together

‘I miss you every day,’ he said

Biting his lip

Reintroducing his hand

Into hers

‘Elliot,’ she says,

Daring to take a step

Into the fog

‘What’s your middle name?’

And somewhere in Canada

A Frenchman fires a gun