By Gerri Brightwell

Over the years her husband has grown fat, his eyes bulbous and his skin florid, and perhaps that’s because he is always angry, yelling at the TV from his recliner, yelling at her for being slow with his dinner, for not being young and pretty anymore, for draining the life out of him with medical bills when she hasn’t even produced a child to make it all worthwhile, and it is during one of these tirades that he flinches and goes limp—a heart attack from which there is no saving him—and on the day of his funeral it rains so hard she can scarcely hear the priest talking about the afterlife over the drumming on her umbrella, and as she walks home, with her feet squeaking miserably in her wet shoes, she thinks about what the priest said, but how absurd it is to think that that husband of hers has been wafted up to heaven or is roasting over an infernal fire when she just saw his coffin lowered into a hole awash with muddy water, and it isn’t until weeks later—after she has boxed up the last of his clothes and dragged his recliner to the sidewalk for whoever wants it, after she has taken down the living-room curtains and thrown open the windows so the whole place fills with light and air—that she finds herself outside a pet store at the mall, staring in at a plump goldfish, and just like that she knows she must buy it, along with a bowl for it to swim its eternal loops around, then she splurges on a sleek dress that clings to her breasts, and in the months that follow she brings men home–a balding guy who cups those breasts of hers oh-so-delicately in his big hands then sobs with joy, a man in a polyester suit, who whispers that looking into her eyes is like gazing into the throbbing heart of the universe—and when she moans beneath them, these men and others, it is in full view of that fish with its bulbous eyes, and its restless mouth that’s forever silent.