By Teresa Burns Gunther
Greg lets himself into his home, weary from a long, grueling week. Tariffs are trashing his construction company’s returns. Shrugging out of his coat he hears his wife, Janine, in the kitchen talking to her girlfriend, in that way women do. Getting naked with their feelings then undressing their men.
“There’s just no fire anymore,” he hears his wife say. “Hasn’t been for a long time.”
Julie says something about them being married, “how many years?!” and “what do you expect?”
“Oh,” Janine sounds wistful. “I know … it’s just … he used to surprise me.”
“What do you want him to do?”
Gary freezes in the hallway, his hands holding his coat over the hook.
“I …” There’s a splash, then another. Refilling wine glasses? “I’m not expecting some cupid’s arrow, but maybe a little fireworks?” She guffaws. Julie laughs. She’s single. She says something Gary can’t hear. “Right. But—no listen Julie, he was daring once.”
He smiles, wondering which of his daring deeds she’s remembering.
There’s a pause. Her chair scrapes against the floor; her scuffed up Birkenstocks clomp across the kitchen. Once she was a fashion plate. Wore sexy heels.
The fridge opens, closes, then a cupboard door creaks. He makes a mental note to oil it. Crackers and cheese? His stomach growls. He cringes, covers his belly with his hands as if this might mute the rumbling. He leans into the wall to make himself smaller.
“It’s just,” Janine says now. “He’s gotten … predictable.”
“Oh, come on. He’s a good man. You’re lucky,” Julie says and for the first time Gary really likes her.
“He is! It’s just, I wish he’d step out—”
“What?!” Julie’s cries.
“No, not like that.” More clomp-clomping. A plate set on the table then the groan of her chair. “Step out of the lines,” she says. “Be a little dangerous. It would help our sex life.”
Julie asks about orgasms and Gary feels himself flush.
“Yeah, usually two, often three,” which makes Gary puff with pride until she says, “When we do it. Which isn’t as often as it should be. As it used to be.”
Gary wants to stomp in and tell her that sometimes he has to work to get himself revved up. And she doesn’t make a lot of effort when he comes home, stressed by the new economic realities at work that pays the insurance, mortgage, Netflix, Apple TV, the Internet, utilities, college tuition for their daughter, and the electric car she had to have to save the planet.
He slips back out the front door and walks around to the garage, grabs a beer from the extra fridge that hikes the electric bill. He sits on the stool at his workbench where he wishes he had more time to fiddle. His tools are organized, his sports equipment on the opposite wall. His skis and golf clubs look forlorn, abandoned. Then he spies his bow hung higher on the wall. It takes some maneuvering to free the ladder. He leans it against the wall over the bicycles and climbs up to the second highest rung.
Who’s predictable now? he wants to shout as he climbs. He stretches to get his fingers around the bow, grabs the quiver. The ladder shivers. He steps down, heart racing. He cannot afford to hurt himself.
He admires the bow, his handiwork, made when he was a teenager. The lighter fluid sits on the shelf by the BBQ. His wife wants a gas grill because this one uses briquettes which makes the BBQ scary and his domain and what about that?
He flexes the bow. Grabs an arrow, then an old green rag from a stack neatly folded on his workbench. It’s the towel that once hung on his golf bag to clean mud and grass off his clubs. He hasn’t played in years, not since his pal Joe died of cancer leaving a damned gaping hole in his life. He played with his father-in-law a few times, talk about danger!
He wraps the rag around the arrow tip, loops his arm through the bow, grabs the lighter fluid and steps into the backyard. He soaks the rag with lighter fluid watching his wife at the kitchen sink in her old sweats, her hair pulled up on her head, showing her silver roots. He hitches the arrow, lights a match. The cloth bursts into flames lighting up the dark back yard.
He senses his wife now at the window. Raises the bow, takes his stance, remembers the feel as if, just yesterday, he was on the HS archery squad, winning competitions. He glances sidelong at Janine, hands now cupped on the glass, her mouth an O fogging the glass. He takes aim at the god damn oak tree that sheds its shit everywhere, shit he spends nine months of the year cleaning up.
He grins, pulls back hard, and lets danger fly.
* * *
Teresa Burns Gunther is an award-winning author whose fiction and nonfiction appear widely in U.S. and international literary journals and anthologies. Her collection Hold Off the Night (2023) was a finalist for the Orison and Hudson Book Prizes, and her new collection, The Adjacent Possible, Longlisted for the Dzanc Prize, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press. She is the founder of Lakeshore Writers Workshop.