My New Wife
—
John Pinto
SHE WAS ON THE LAM when she was seven. That was the summer of Mike Phelps Olympics. It was her and her uncle and nobody else. They shared piss-gold fast food breakfast mornings—dewy fields beyond the parking lot and freshly thawed OJ, swastikas or something really like them in the floor tiles—while the ATF was hot on their heels.
My wife at seven could be pretty cooperative. Never whined about the wig and makeup her uncle insisted she wear for disguise. Never rolled around on the fast food dining room floor. Never cried, and she tried her best to eat everything her uncle gave her. One gray morning, she had to spit her first bite of breakfast sausage into a napkin.
“You put that back in there this instant,” her uncle said, “because that is DNA. Leave that lying around and they’ll find it. You’ll get us caught and killed.”
My wife looked down at the gray staining her napkin. “But it’s got eyes and wings in it.”
They’d been driving for days through some kind of every-seventeen year bug bloom. Red-eyed cicadas coated the car. Cheery people ate them on the news. “These guys will be,” the cheery ones would say, “the shrimp of the new millennium,” and then they would eat a bug. I remember those broadcasts, though I grew up in a different chunk of the country. Our bugs ran on a different calendar. They did emerge one Olympics later, and I remember forcing this friendless boy to stomp flat two cicadas that were lost in the fog of lovemaking. I understand my wife’s distress. Her uncle made her eat the sausage anyway.
In the early afternoon, she fell into a fever. She sweat all her makeup away. Her hair fell out in wisps under her wig. The wheeze of ten billion cicadas, and the plinks when they met the killer windshield… she stuffed her ears with tissue. She puked gray out the window and saw it hit moving asphalt—DNA. In a rest stop parking lot, she puked more gray beside an eighteen-wheeler that was fuzzy with bugs—DNA again.
“But by then it didn’t matter,” my wife says. She wets her lips with porto tonico. She is the slowest drinker in the world. “Uncle Shane was inside the rest stop, surrendering to a cashier who didn’t know who we were or what we were running from…”
The story is known to me but new to the couple we’re drinking with. They look a little alarmed! Can’t imagine them surviving on the lam.
“... didn’t even know,” my wife is saying, “what Uncle Shane stood for. They thought he was a very shy man botching a robbery.”
“But you’re safe now,” says the girl half of the couple.
“I was always safe,” my wife says, and then again, “Perfectly safe, always,” when the girl half looks unconvinced and queasy. She’ll be unconvinced forever. Even now, with some college and a husband to lean on, my wife will not call it kidnapping. Her loyalty, and the way her gray eyes go bloodshot when she lets her loyalty take over—those are for sure the hottest things about her. •
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John Pinto is a film lab technician living in Philadelphia. Some of his work has appeared in Sarka, ergot., Scaffold, Little Engines, and X-R-A-Y.
Website | Bluesky | Instagram
My wife at seven could be pretty cooperative. Never whined about the wig and makeup her uncle insisted she wear for disguise. Never rolled around on the fast food dining room floor. Never cried, and she tried her best to eat everything her uncle gave her. One gray morning, she had to spit her first bite of breakfast sausage into a napkin.
“You put that back in there this instant,” her uncle said, “because that is DNA. Leave that lying around and they’ll find it. You’ll get us caught and killed.”
My wife looked down at the gray staining her napkin. “But it’s got eyes and wings in it.”
They’d been driving for days through some kind of every-seventeen year bug bloom. Red-eyed cicadas coated the car. Cheery people ate them on the news. “These guys will be,” the cheery ones would say, “the shrimp of the new millennium,” and then they would eat a bug. I remember those broadcasts, though I grew up in a different chunk of the country. Our bugs ran on a different calendar. They did emerge one Olympics later, and I remember forcing this friendless boy to stomp flat two cicadas that were lost in the fog of lovemaking. I understand my wife’s distress. Her uncle made her eat the sausage anyway.
In the early afternoon, she fell into a fever. She sweat all her makeup away. Her hair fell out in wisps under her wig. The wheeze of ten billion cicadas, and the plinks when they met the killer windshield… she stuffed her ears with tissue. She puked gray out the window and saw it hit moving asphalt—DNA. In a rest stop parking lot, she puked more gray beside an eighteen-wheeler that was fuzzy with bugs—DNA again.
“But by then it didn’t matter,” my wife says. She wets her lips with porto tonico. She is the slowest drinker in the world. “Uncle Shane was inside the rest stop, surrendering to a cashier who didn’t know who we were or what we were running from…”
The story is known to me but new to the couple we’re drinking with. They look a little alarmed! Can’t imagine them surviving on the lam.
“... didn’t even know,” my wife is saying, “what Uncle Shane stood for. They thought he was a very shy man botching a robbery.”
“But you’re safe now,” says the girl half of the couple.
“I was always safe,” my wife says, and then again, “Perfectly safe, always,” when the girl half looks unconvinced and queasy. She’ll be unconvinced forever. Even now, with some college and a husband to lean on, my wife will not call it kidnapping. Her loyalty, and the way her gray eyes go bloodshot when she lets her loyalty take over—those are for sure the hottest things about her. •
John Pinto is a film lab technician living in Philadelphia. Some of his work has appeared in Sarka, ergot., Scaffold, Little Engines, and X-R-A-Y.
Website | Bluesky | Instagram