The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories Read Free Page A

hand out small vials of a clear liquid to each passenger as he passed. With each vial handed out, he would repeat, “Two drops should do. No more than two drops. Don’t want to overdo it. Two drops should do just fine.” Once he was finished, he walked to the front of the plane again, turned to us, and said, “Bon appétit,” and then stepped back into his cockpit, the door closing solidly behind him.
    As we ran low on drops, the Pilot would bring us new vials.
    I’m not sure how they work or what sustenance they provide. While I am still hungry after my two drops, while I still have an insatiable appetite and the desire for some unnameable flavor in my mouth (the drops at first had a mild grassy taste to them, but are now as good as flavorless, as I can’t taste anything at all, or else I seem to have forgotten almost entirely what anything might taste like) and I have lost weight and will probably continue to lose weight, I have not starved. As far as I know, no one who has taken the drops has.

     
    The Pilot would come out of his cabin two or three times a day. As he grew older and as his blond hair turned, in places, white, I began to wonder how he felt in the mornings when he woke up, if he felt as old and tired as I sometimes felt.
    I assumed he slept. He locked the cabin door at night, so none of us knew for sure. I asked him once if he slept and he didn’t answer me, and then I asked him, if he did sleep, who flew the plane. He laughed and patted his belly and said, “My copilot.” When I asked him, recently, if his copilot would also be the one to fly the plane once he has died, he did not respond, pretending not to have heard my question.

     
    It is surprising to me how quickly news of the hijacking spread. I called my wife within the hour of being told we had been hijacked, and she already knew. The people of Dallas organized a vigil that very night. We could see the huddled bunch of them with their candles standing on the tarmac of the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. Someone—a gentleman from the rear of the plane—said, “Them standing there, we couldn’t land even if we wanted to.” In the morning, the same group of people (or perhaps a new group) stood in approximately the same formation, this time holding white posters with black letters on them that spelled out something too small for us to read.
    For a while, I liked to think of my wife there among them, holding a candle or a piece of the message, but, in truth, my wife does not like crowds, and it’s more likely that she was not.
    Within a week, regardless of my wife’s involvement or lack thereof, the vigils had stopped, the news reports, I’m almost certain, had stopped as well, and we had become a fixture of the Dallas skyline, no different or more exciting than the neon Mobile Pegasus.
    II.
     
    I often find myself considering the man my wife married, by which I usually mean myself, a thought that then returns me to the fact that she has since remarried, and so I am forced to think of the two of us, her husband and I, side by side. This despite the fact that I have never seen him, which leads me, more often than not, to picture myself side by side my other self so that I might consider how the two of us have failed and how we continue to fail as husbands. I have a cataloged list in my head; it grows by the day, and it changes nearly constantly as faults are moved around, given more or less priority, my dirty underwear left on the bathroom floor moved down a rung by the peanut-butter-encrusted knife left for a week in the backseat of my car. When I get into this mood of rearranging faults—real and imagined—I begin to wonder, too, what the other passengers, those who are left, are thinking. We are not friends, any of us. Of course, we were all friends at first, or, at the very least, friendly with those people to our left or our right or across the aisle, as people on a plane tend to be, in that manner of searching for common ground in a