by Jesse Raub
Shuffled #7

She goes to bed every night at ten-thirty after turning off the TV and brushing her teeth in the bathroom.  I listen to her ritual from my chair down the hall in our little office, frozen in front of the computer.  When I hear the sheets rustle as she crawls into bed, and the click of the dog’s toenails as he follows her into the bedroom, I let out the deep breath I’ve been holding in and switch my window from the bright-white-speckled-black-with-words manuscript to the images Sandra sent me of her in just her bra and panties in front of a bathroom mirror.

I can’t deny the surge of guilt that churns in my stomach as I study the white curve of Sandra’s hip, just below the black elastic waistband.  And I wish I could claim it was just sexual, but there’s a level of fascination that takes sway.  Four years of living together and I’m stuck with an inbox of “what ifs.”

Our communication has broken down at home.  We try to talk across the dinner table, the dog nosing his way under my hand for scraps.  Neither of us manage to build conversation on top of the other’s sentences and we can’t bear to make eye contact. The nights she doesn’t spend in front of the TV she spends in bed, sometimes just staring at the wall, sometimes crying; on these nights, I drown out all sound by putting a jazz record on the stereo and turning up the volume.

Sandra was an accident.  A comment left on a message board, a bad joke that had me laughing with my mouth shoved into a cupped hand, lest I be heard throughout the house raising suspicions.  Sandra, addicted to attention, escalated with a suggestive photo attached to an email.  And though I know it didn’t feel right, I never put a stop to it.  I didn’t encourage her, though, either.

After twenty minutes, when I know she’s asleep, I turn out all the lights and brush my own teeth.  I peel off my clothes and step over the dog.  I slide cautiously under the sheets and start to wonder if I remembered to close all the pictures out, or if I left my email open.  She turns over to face the wall, and I’m paralyzed under the covers, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this is what it would feel like if I started dissolving into nothing.

“Dissolving” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“Dissolving” is a short fiction interpretation of the Aloha song of the same name from the album Sugar, released through Polyvinyl Records in the year 2002. It is the seventh story written as part of the Shuffled series, in which inspiration is chosen by random computerized algorithms on a well stocked iPod.