take a picture of my shirt

like her hero fitzgerald, riley tried to achieve death by candy bar

(revival)

“Marriage” by George Ha
I was being interrogated on the whereabouts of my wife. I was in the chair and looking out the window while the officer asked me questions. I had been looking at the same set of long, white legs, but couldn’t make out a face to go with the body. I left my glasses on my nightstand.
The officer was a heavyset man, short curly hair with a toothpick hanging out of his mouth. He was reading from an important looking piece of paper, but I couldn’t make out the words on the page. I had an impulse to roll up whatever it was that he was reading and thwack him in the head with it.
“How long has your wife been gone, Mr Johnston?” he asked.
“Sixteen days.”
“Did she know we were coming for her?”
“She’s gone, isn’t she?”
I kept looking out the window. The set of legs got up for a minute, but the officer blocked my view. He pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and jabbed the air for a few seconds and then put it back in.
“What do you think?”
“About what?”
“This whole murder thing.”
There’s a lot to explain about that time and about what had happened with Jackie. Divorce rates had skyrocketed to 93% in the fall of 2019, and coincidentally, suicide rates had also gone up. The lawmakers in D.C. decided that the number one reason for divorce was adultery. Human beings had proved incapable of being faithful to one another. A law needed to be put in place. An act of unfaithfulness to one’s spouse was now punishable by death. I thought it was a bit overdramatic, seeing as the adulterers were now replacing the suicides, but I’m not a lawmaker, so I don’t know.
Jackie had made love to a mysterious stranger and felt such remorse that she murdered him and tried to hide the body in a closet. The officer said that the entire thing had been done quite hastily and that Jackie had probably left right away. They found the man just hanging there by his jacket with a toothpick in his mouth.
“I’m wondering, if you don’t mind, what it is that happened between the two of you.”
I was thinking pretty hard at this point but I couldn’t think of much outside of opening cereal boxes the wrong way. She had yelled at me a few times for that. I never knew what she was talking about, but she yelled at me anyway.
“Mr. Johnston?”
The acid I had taken with coffee that morning was really starting to kick in. The flashing lights around the officer’s head were now turning shades of blue and purple, and I found myself more attracted to them than the conversation I was having. I looked out the window to see if the moon was outside, and I noticed that the legs had disappeared.
“What happened to the curves outside?”
The officer looked out the window.
“What are you talking about?”
“The girl that was sitting there.”
“The old man that was out there? That wasn't no girl.”
“She had these long silky legs.”
The officer looked puzzled and went outside to talk on his phone. Memories of Jackie asking me to call her started to flood in. After school she would say, after work, after I picked up the boys from school, after doing the groceries, after having a cigarette, after making a sandwich, after making love. I grabbed the apricot that was sitting the floor and kissed it before wrapping my mouth around it. I didn’t bite into it - I was trying to see if I could suck the juice through the skin.
I wondered if the officer had known about the girl outside and had told the old man to take her away.
“Let her stay,” I murmured under my breath. “She didn’t do nothing wrong.”
I laughed. They taught us never to use double negatives starting in kindergarten. I thought of the pilgrim hats we made out of construction paper for Thanksgiving and wondered if the real pilgrims had made their hats in the same way. I started to think of this girl who had a slight hunch just like Jackie that I had a crush on back then, but I couldn’t make out what she looked like. I tried to sound out her name.
“Jassie… Jessica….Jasper…”
Jackie had changed her name from Florence right when we got married. I was confused at first, and would call her Florence on accident. She would get mad and say she thought that “Jacqueline” sounded elegant and that it reminded her of the first lady and that I had no business telling her what her name could and couldn’t be. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she yelled at me anyway.
The officer came back in smelling of cigarettes.
“Hey, do you mind? The smell of those things is giving me a fucking headache.”
“You said it was alright earlier. You even offered me one.”
I didn’t remember. I might have. I had tried giving up smoking but I started back up when Jackie left.
“I’m sorry, officer. I’m trying to quit. You know how these things go.”
“Mr. Johnston, are you all right? You look a bit scattered.”
I heard Jackie’s voice calling me from upstairs.
“John, honey? Are you smoking down there? I can smell it from up here! Are you smoking? John?”
“It’s just the officer, honey, go back to sleep.”
The officer put his hand on my shoulder.
“Who are you talking to?”
I couldn’t sit still. I got up on my feet and started to move around, stopping to examine everything in the living room. I picked up a picture Jackie in her wedding dress and positioned it in front of my eyes. I looked over at the officer, whose head was turning into Noah‘s ark. I looked back at the picture to stay faithful, but Jackie had turned into an old man with long legs. I started to think about those girl’s legs and a giraffe’s neck side by side. It all made sense to me then. I looked back at the officer and tried to articulate what I was feeling.
“Your head looks just like the boat that the pilgrims used!”
“Excuse me?”
“Noah used a boat just like that too!”
“Mr. Johnston, you’re not making any sense.”
“Don’t you feel like you don’t stretch enough?”
I leaned over the chair as if I was trying to touch my toes over it. As soon as the officer reached over to stop me, I picked the chair up and clobbered him over the head.
He was lying there silently now, eyes open. I was looking at myself in the mirror, and he was looking at me too. If the officer saw something, he didn’t offer his opinion. If my reflection saw something, he didn’t say anything either. I felt lonely all of a sudden. I reached into the officer’s pockets and pulled out a lighter and some smokes. I took a cigarette, held it between my lips for a second, and looked at my reflection. I liked the way I looked when I smoked. I lay next to the officer, put his arm around my torso and looked at the ground, smoking my cigarette.
I took his hands and ran them through my hair slowly, the way Jackie used to. She used to touch my scalp with the tips of her fingers, and look off into the distance as if she was thinking about something else.
“Jackie?”
I let the smoke out of my lungs slowly and shook her arm gently. She never said anything.