Dept. Of Speculation

27

He sent the girl a love letter over the radio. Later, the wife sees his playlist from that night. It is from the night before she went out of town. The night before it first happened. She listens to the songs he played one by one, ticking each of them off the list.

Afterwards, the wife sits on the toilet for a long time because her stomach is twisting. She feels something rising in her throat and spits into her daughter’s pink plastic bucket. Just a little bile. She dry-heaves again, but nothing. The longer she sits there, the more she notices how dingy and dirty the bathroom is. There is a tangle of hair on the side of the sink, some kind of creeping mildew on the shower curtain. Their towels are no longer white and are fraying along the edges. Her underwear too is dinged nearly gray. The elastic is coming out a little. Who would wear such a thing? What kind of repulsive creature? She takes her underwear off and wraps it around and around in toilet paper, then puts it in the bottom of the trash where no one will see.

When you pick up one piece of dust, the entire world comes with it.

“I am alone,” her student says. “Everyone is tired of this. No one will come anymore.” But Lia is only twenty-four. She is beautiful and brilliant. There are so many more years when people will come.

Your friends and students adore you.

The wife loses a twenty-dollar bill somewhere between the store and home, but she can’t make herself go back to look for it. In the last store, the clerk was unkind to her or at least not kind.

I only wanted you to adore me.