Affair

CW: Gore, body horror

The house was in tatters. The house was always in tatters.

A clamor came from within, and belched out as the toddlers Marcus and Freia spilled into the yard, overgrown and strewn with plastic toys. Freia cried and swung at Marcus; Marcus, oblivious to his sister, ran with precocious ferocity, chasing a trio of squirrels.

Their father, Baron Cobert, forty-two and feeling every bit of it climbed from his vehicle. He wanted to swing the door shut behind him; but knew the car was likely to drop its bowels at such a gesture. So he was, humiliatingly, forced to close the door tenderly. There was nothing he wanted to be tender about any more.

As he crossed the yard, grimacing at the neighbor's trailer where the fat man ever sat, smoking and drinking, mosquitoes clambered over one another for a chance at his neck. Something hovered around his eye and wouldn't leave. Baron positively heaved with blind fury, blind frustration when he turned into the home. He didn't have to look, he knew where the Wife would be; larger, less sexed every day. Her immense hovered at the sink like a cloud, she said something to him which he ignored. He opened a beer and sat at the table, but could not yet drink, he put his head into his hands and wept silently.

Long Pine Estates had conceived many men like Baron, and many women like his wife Sheila, and indeed many children such as Marcus and Freia. They were the underclass of American life; too poor, too tired, too indebted by their own parent's life choices to make any headway. To see that they'd clawed nothing back and that the inheritance of the next generation would be this same debt plus interest. No novelties here, just the toiling, roiling numbers.

And Baron was unexceptional as a man, which meant that as a man he was not as apologetic as perhaps he should have been to dismay at the growing sexlessness of his marriage, and the soft boiled shape, not to say demeanor, his wife increasingly took on. Rather than address her of this, to seek equitable solution as a friend might have put it, he took immediately to the comfort offered by a peer at work. She was hooked, knobbed and structured in all the ways that Sheila was round, dimpled and gelatinous. Baron had, showing his cards, gone for his wife's exact opposite. And this woman, Jesse by name, was anything but sexless.

Yet congress was never had. Not exactly. Work did not offer the opportunity – his early dream of filing room romps went entirely unrequited. Nor did he have the courage to arrange visits when Sheila trusted him to be at home. No, physical union did not happen. Instead, over the course of months, the two played a game of sorts. They would meet in their dreams. It began at Jesse's invitation, skepticism toward which Baron put aside in the interest of his lust, to picture her in her nighty, and taking him in her arms and legs. He was given homework. “Come up with a phrase,” she had said, with a whiff of a wink, “say it at least five times before bed, every night. And above all – visualize.” Well, he hardly needed a second invitation to do that. But admittedly, the mantra was harder to derive, and it made him too self conscious to utter. After a number of blushing attempts to say something salacious he gave in to what, for some reason, came naturally into his head, and taking her advice to yield began his nightly refrain; “Mantle hits a homer”. He didn't even watch Baseball.

The recitation took time, but boy could he visualize from the get. And there was something intimate about this bedtime ritual, hiding away from Sheila who contentedly snored on the sofa in front of the TV. It was indistinguishable in many ways, even before the eventual somnolent achievement, from a flesh and all affair.

But then it happened. What he'd been assured of. The experience of his dream – typically vague, drifting and chaotic – gained stereo. He was able to get purchase on the fantasy, willed by his vision, and when he took her in his arms, when her legs wrapped around him, it was in the nonnegotiable terms offered by the waking world. The day after this first success, Jesse's face was blushed, and his pulse raced when she met his eye, and he knew that she knew; for the first time they had been together.

So was the start of a satisfactory affair; over which time he felt no semblance of guilt for Sheila, who continued to soften and regress, it seemed to Baron, mentally as well as physically. Her eyes took on the gleaming innocence of childhood, an affect he did not find endearing. It was, in fact, disgusting. Not only had she lost any sense of desiring sex herself, she had devolved into a being he could no longer contemplate being with, lest it feel improper in some way. She remained sweet, if indulgent, with the children, and godspeed to her for that, he thought. Leave her to it. I'll live my life.

And that life, between lovers, was unrestrained in its manner and articulation. As an author, he could write her into any lingerie he wanted, any position he wanted, to any point of ecstasy she might want; she could never be unsatisfied. And despite his lingering dubiousness that their meetings were anything but the constructs of particularly vivid and lucid dreams, he had on occasion recognized her posture, her breathlessness, her rather more frontal attention which followed to suggest he was actually having some influence over her. He began increasingly to believe that the sex, at its mind numbing peak, was real.

Now, jump forward, and he, having dried his surreptitious tears upon a sleeve, took a sip of his lurid beer and watch the family dog 'Nelly' work a soiled diaper from the garbage pale, heaving with flies and a sweet, ripe odor. Nelly watched from the corner of her eyes, weighing her chances, proceeding in quick, halting tugs. Baron kicked and Nelly scattered. The diaper dropped to the yellow linoleum with a plop.

“You be nice to that dog,” hollered Sheila, without looking up from her work at the sink.

In his tenderized state, after today's tragedy -- unmercifully disseminated as just an item in broad spectrum gossip by his gray faced coworkers – he was as likely to slap her as kiss her. Choosing to ignore the shallowness of his need, and too tired for confrontation, Baron allowed himself to look at the billowing backside of the woman in the kitchen and recognize it as belonging to his wife. With softened eyes he asked, “Sheila, what are you making?”

“Take a flying guess,” she said and shimmied. There was something in her voice.

“Again,” he moaned. He was playing along, and his beer was empty.

“You know it. And speaking of,” Sheila lifted a hand toward the open door, “would you get those kids in here to clean up?”

As he passed, Baron dragged a hand along her rump. This was more contact than they had had in a year. He wondered if it was wrong to pursue it, in light of things. But, better not look a gift horse in the mouth, he thought, unsure if he knew the phrase's meaning. Sheila was looking better than she had in a year, and by the way she pushed ever so slightly back against his hand, at least some degree of her sexuality had apparently returned. Maybe she to, was having an affair, he mused, and found it didn't bother him.

“Get in the house,” he yelled from the door. “We're gonna eat, and then it's going to be an early night for you kids.”

Later that night, Baron stood before the mirror, having washed himself with unusual care, examining his features; the face he deserved. And he contemplated it; the news.

“Did you hear,” one office neighbor had said to another. The other had replied, “Yeah, that's crazy.”

“Hear what?” Baron had asked, uninterested.

“Who's getting her office do you know?”

“Nah. Bret says he might use it for a PA.”

“Wait, hear what?” Baron repeated.

Jesse had been found by a roommate. She was unresponsive in bed. Paramedics were called in and she was declared dead on scene. A toxicology report was due claimed office chatter, but Baron, straining to maintain an air of distracted curiosity, could not get an answer about where this information came from. He supposed he didn't actually really know his lover, and perhaps she did have a drug habit. She had that kind of austere, ropy appearance, he thought.

Whilst he felt sorry for Jesse, and about whatever had happened, he could not help but curse the luck of his life that this outlet had been cut short. God had shown him what could be, and then taken it away. Upon returning home he had wept, unapolagetically in self-pity.

But, swings and roundabouts. Sheila was, all signs good, back up for it. And if he wasn't prepared quite to rejoice, he could take some measure of consolation.

Baron looked in the mirror and considered the speckling of coarse hair above his lip; he wondered if Sheila would like the feel of it.

Tiptoeing into the bedroom so as not excite Nelly, and in turn risk waking the kids, he realized he hadn't brushed his teeth, and the beer was sour on his tongue. Oh well. In the weak diffuse moonlight, he could see the hillock that was Sheila. By gentle contrast he could discern the blue satin gown she had on, the one that had always promised sex. It had been so long that he suddenly felt unsure of himself; but as if to quell this she turned, from her side to her back, and drew one soft leg against the other, letting out a soft sigh. He moved in, and was immediately enfolded by her.

In sleep, his vision was restless and technicolor, and there was an imposing sense of ennui, as though he were sitting strenuously, doing nothing, for too long. An odd, red tinted rabbit jumped in and out of unremarkable narratives; an odd cameo, but one which added counter intuitively to the tedium of the experience. You again? In other words, the experience of sleep returned to how it was before Jesse.

Without lucidity, the familiar chaos of the mind had returned. Shapes, sounds, concepts, hieroglyphs, slips in perceived time, irregularities in banal places.

And then he saw Sheila, and felt immense guilt. She was big and small at the same time; tightly bounded in satin. She moved slowly, seeming to walk in place, mesmerizing him, with every doughy fold alive. Baron felt tears. He also felt seduced.

Sense of space obliterated, he found she was inexplicably upon him. Pressing him back with the soft palms of her hands into a somniferous dark where he lay supine, watching up at the mountainous woman above him. She placed one thundering leg to his left, and one to his right, and lowered herself slowly and unforgivably onto his chest. Breath was expressed from him audibly, and he could not draw it anew. She was too heavy. His veins burst, and eyes raged hot. His chest was caving in.

Then he woke up with a lurch and a groan. He trembled, and felt around, eyes adjusting. Beside him was Sheila, on her side, facing away. She sighed, and threw a hand back onto his lap.

“Go back to bed baby,” she said.