"Closer Than They Appear" by Cary Rainey
Wasn’t Garfunkel the one with blisters on his fingers?
There is a split-second when the world stops and I see the reflection of the flat grey sun on the overpass, and I don’t know if the reflection’s coming from water or from ice and that seems appropriate, because I’m thinking about that split-second in bed the night Danny came home from his trip to Miami, that split-second when the world stopped and I knew something was wrong. We were lying in bed after having sex and were drinking these drinks and then we curled up together so that we could both look out the window and see the stars and we were lying there, on our sides, and he had his right arm beneath my pillow and his left arm wrapped around me and we were like we always are (were, were) after sex, but something wasn’t right. I felt it just for that split-second as we lay there and then it was gone. There was something different and I knew it, but I didn’t know what it was. His touch had just felt different, just for that split-second. It was strange, unfamiliar, somehow, and it scared me. I didn’t know what to do or what I could say, so I didn’t do or say anything. I just laid there and quietly looked at the stars until he fell asleep and then I closed my eyes and I went to sleep. This was the week after our two-year anniversary and what had started out as just a bad, phantom feeling in bed one night, turned, over the course of the next few weeks, into something almost solid, something almost tangible, something so big and hard and forceful that it dominated every room we tried to share. We couldn’t even face each other most of the time and every time we parted company, I was always terrified that this was how it was going to be from now on, that life was going to go on like this forever and I just wanted things to go back to the way they were and I would sit there in the empty house after he went to work and I would worry about it and I would pace all over the house and I would sit in the bedroom or in the kitchen or in the living room or in the bathtub and sometimes I would just stare into space and silently rock back and forth and sometimes when I was walking the floor I would talk to myself, trying to talk through the situation with a voice of reason, a voice of sanity. I tried to get a grip on things, to figure something out: a cause, a cure, anything. I did all this because I needed to find a way to fix this terrible problem that was living and growing inside my perfect husband, whatever it was. I needed to take us both, Danny and myself, back to the way it was before, back to when the only problem we had was that I could only have an orgasm when I was on top.
Everything is fine because I’m breathing steadily and the snow’s weak and there have probably been dozens of cars come across the overpass by now and my foot’s keeping it good and I’ve got the steering locked down and I’m just nothing but Queen Bitch Hell On Wheels right now, keeping it real, keeping my nose to the ground and my ear to the wall and my eyes on the prize.
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