By Michael Snyder

Pamela had wanted just two things this morning, a little more sleep than normal and a lot more coffee. She managed forty-five delicious minutes of the former and is padding off toward the kitchen to service her caffeine addiction when she sees her husband at the counter, his face bunched in concentration.

“Andy? What’s up? Why haven’t you left for work?”

“There.” He points toward a thick black power cord firmly ensconced in a wall socket. “I want you to practice.”

Pamela trails the length of the cord, which seems to dead-end at the waistband of her husband’s sweatpants. She blinks several times, then considers the cord, and prays it’s neither inserted nor attached to anything important down there.

“Come on,” Andy says.

“What?” Pamela finally manages. “Why?”

“You need to practice. When the time comes, you need to be ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“To pull the plug.”

“But you’re not even sick.”

“You don’t know that.”

“And even if you were, you’re certainly not on life support.”

“You don’t know that either.”

“Look,” Pamela says. “I realize work sucks right now. But it’s not going to kill you.”

For the past two weeks, Andy had been inviting colleagues to enter his office, to close the door behind them, to please take a seat. Then he would deliver the white-collar equivalent of It’s not you, it’s me.

Husband and wife lock gazes until an actual tear threatens to spill over Andy’s lower lid. Then Pamela walks to the outlet and grips the cord. He closes his eyes and holds his breath. She pulls the plug and lets it fall. There are no tears when Andy opens his eyes again, no relief, nothing. The cord slips from his waistband and thwacks impotently onto the tiled floor. The gnarled rubber flares like the head of a serpent where Andy had nicked it. The exposed wire seems to flit like a tongue.

Andy nods. Not at her, not at anything. He just grabs his backpack and leaves.

As Pamela grinds coffee beans, she recalls Andy’s sweatpants and Nirvana t-shirt, and wonders when, or even if, he might come back to change. When she thumbs the power on the coffee maker, exactly nothing happens. Pamela would swear the cord behind her slithers and hisses. She whirls on it and kicks it into a corner.

~

There was a third thing Pamela wanted, but it felt wrong to think about with Andy in the house. If all goes according to plan, Pamela will leave home today a loyal wife and mother of three, only to return blighted and unchaste. Eric is not, nor will he ever be, the man of any sane woman’s dreams. But he is present, alive, and actually sees something when he looks at her, something he wants.

She checks her texts, then her conscience. Nothing, at least nothing that resembles actual guilt.

Freshly showered, Pamela aims the blow dryer at her reflection and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. She inspects the dryer only to find a nub where the cord should be. “Andy,” she says under her breath, “What the hell have you done?” She checks the small fan in the bathroom, the vacuum, the bedside lamp, the router. All snipped, cordless, and dead.

~

When her precious daughters return from school and discover their father facedown in a backyard in a litter of rotten plywood, bleeding from a gash on his skull, their criminally negligent mother is indeed perched on a hotel bed, fully clothed, working her way through the minibar and deleting hate-texts from Eric, who had pounded on the hotel door until management called security.

“Nothing happened,” Pamela says to the empty room. “Nothing ever does.”

Then her eldest daughter calls. “I know you’re on a business trip thing. But you need to come home.”

“Why? What’s up, kiddo?”

She hears the word “daddy” and then her daughter’s voice melting into sobs. Pamela moves her mouth, but it’s as if her own cord had been clipped. Is Daddy okay? Can you put him on? Did he finally jam an electrical cord up his butt and throw a breaker? Is he dead?

~

The girls were forbidden to enter the dilapidated tree fort that came with the house. But Andy had apparently spent quite a bit of time there recently, writing in journals, writing on walls, even his own skin. Most of it was nonsense. But the narrative was there if you knew what to look for. He wrote about his daughters, about his friend Donnie driving off a bridge for the insurance money, about some asshole named Eric. But mostly he wrote about his own failings as a husband, a father, an employee, a friend, a son, and a lover.

Andy laid off thirteen employees in all, including Donnie, his best mate since middle school. Then his boss asked Andy to close the door, to please take a seat.

~

The prognosis is not good.

“If only we’d gotten him into surgery sooner,” the doctor had said, “then perhaps the swelling on his brain….”

She didn’t hear the rest, couldn’t hear it.

Pamela tries praying, but after so many years away, it feels disingenuous. So she does the most sensible thing she can think to do. She removes a power strip from her purse, one with an illuminated switch and surge protector, then a pair of garden shears. Once visiting hours are over, Pamela sneaks into an unoccupied patient room and snips the power cords of the most expensive-looking pieces of equipment. Back in Andy’s room, she sockets the prongs into place, then threads six snipped ends under the thin blanket, careful not to let the exposed copper prick his skin.

She grips the power strip’s plug until it hurts, until the prongs threaten to pierce her palm. Then Pamela flicks the power button on, then off, watching her husband’s eyelids. And then again. And again.