I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) Read Free

hockey sticks and electric guitars with tensile fishing-line strings.
    Help the six-year-old wire the pinecone angel the two of you made to the top of the tree.
    Do not forget to take pictures.
    I’m going to get rid of it, you tell your husband. I’m going to roll it up in a sheet and drag it outside.
    Leave it, your husband says. I need you to see that it won’t decompose.
    I won’t look at it, you say.
    Look all you want, he says.
    To prove yourself, you roll the corpse over to your side of the bed. One of the arms winds up twisted beneath the torso—a horrifying, impossible bend in the wrist. You resist the urge to adjust. You slide over to your husband’s side of the bed, across the midsection, which is a bit moist. You wish there were a stench, something to permanently disgust you, but there is only the menthol/plastic/cookie scent, which you actually don’t find unpleasant.
    You turn your back to the man’s body and wrap your arms around your husband’s chest from behind, clinging to his torso like it’s a buoy. He doesn’t move. You lift your shirt so he can feel the warmth of your breasts pressing into his back.
    Your friends tell you to look at the body.
    Give yourself permission to grieve, they say. Spend time with it, then bury the thing.
    You assume the passage of a week will make looking at him easier—you will see the horrific side of death—but the corpse remains, to you, flawless. You notice some swelling in the joints, but the lips are full, the skin on the face smooth. The abdomen is a bit paunchy, but wasn’t this one of the things you admired about the man, his refusal to become a slave to the gym when he hit middle age? The way he embraced his own imperfections, and yours?
    You find a Christian therapist named Bobbie in the yellow pages. You choose her not because she’s Christian, but because her office is in Hixson, as far from Lookout Mountain as you can get without leaving the city limits. Bobbie asks you to list ten positive and ten negative memories from your childhood. You tell her that’s not why you came.
    You tell her there’s a watermelon in your stomach.
    You tell her that every sentence you were in the habit of crafting for the other man—every thought and feeling you were accustomed to sharing—is now taking up residence inside your body.
    You tell her you might just need to unload .
    I thought you were here because you wanted to save your marriage, Bobbie says.
    That too, you say.
    What we find, in most cases, she says, is that the woman lacked affirmation in her childhood. We’ll identify the lies from your childhood and, using various techniques such as eye movement therapies, replace them with truths.
    What if the truth is I’m in love with him? you say. What if the truth is he was the one I was supposed to marry?
    I assume that biblical truth is what you’re most concerned with, Bobbie says.
    We talked about having a baby together, you say before you walk out.
    III. Active Decay: in which the greatest loss of mass occurs. Purged fluids accumulate around the body, creating a cadaver decomposition island (CDI).
    Christmas comes and goes. The children seem happy with their gifts, but you’re not sure. It’s hard to listen when they speak. They are loud and clamorous with need. Your husband requires constant reassurance. The body is still on your bed, though you’ve covered it with a sheet, which sags over the midsection of the body, rising to a peak at the toes. You spray Febreze and keep the bedroom door locked.
    On drives up and down the mountain you use the Slow Traffic Pull Over spaces to park the van and crawl your hands around the steering wheel, around and around, listening to yourself repeat the other man’s name to hear what he used to hear, your name to remember what it was like to listen. In the shower you trail handfuls of your own hair along the wet tiles, pull clusters of