My Wife

My Wife


I lost my wife about three years ago. There hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t thought about her. Everyday I wake up in my giant bed, expecting her warm body against mine, breathing. But I turn and just see some worn sheets and find myself hugging a cool pillow. Everyday for the last three years—you’d think I’d get wise to the idea by now.

I come home everyday from work and hug and kiss the air and think to myself “why don’t I smell dinner”? And then it hits me. She’s gone. Not a damn day goes by. Not a damn day goes by where I don’t go to the crucifix in my room and beg the plastic figurine on the wood cross to bring her back, if at least for a day. And it always ends the same way: my head’s in my hands, bawling my eyes out. Sometimes I feel a hand on my shoulder and it tells me, “Get up you, pansy. You’ll be fine.” I turn around. It’s just cold air. Nothing but cold air, everyday. There isn’t a thing here that doesn’t remind me of her, I swear.

One day, a day like the rest of them, I look at the crucifix again, but this time I got an idea. God’s not helping me. But maybe someone else could.


There’s a small Catholic church down the street from me. I haven’t really gone in there since I was ten. But I guess it’s a good time to start again.

I step through the wooden door and bless myself. I’m greeted by a vast army of empty pews. A marble altar and an unhappy-looking Jesus on a crucifix stare at me from the front. A lone gray priest sits in the last pew with emerald rosary beads sliding through his bony fingers. I sit next to him.

“Hi, father.”

He shook his head and looked at me, like I just woke him up or something. “Hello, brother.” He put his rosary aside.

“Am I bothering you?”

“No. Not at all. What can I do for you, brother?”

I cleared my throat. I’m not quite sure how I’d word this without sounding like a Satanist or something. “Um, I’m not sure how I can ask this. I don’t want you getting the wrong impression.”

The priest smiled warmly. “Ask it as you may. I won’t judge you.”

“All right. Well, I’ll be blunt. Where the hell do I find the devil?”

The bony old priest turned into a skeleton. The smile wiped off his face. “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, you know—Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness and so on.”

“I understood that. But why would you want to do that? I don’t understand.”

“Just curious.”

He looked at me like most cops look at criminals. “Curiosity killed the cat, didn’t it?”

“I’m not a cat.”

“But don’t think you’re smarter than one.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

He sighed. “Faust searched for the devil. He lost his soul and his nobility.”

“I’m not Faust. I just need to know. It’s for a school research project, I swear.”

The bony old priest winced and breathed out heavily. “The devil is nowhere. You can find him anywhere, in anyone. Every time we sin, we do his work and become him. Does that answer your question?”

“No.” I got up and treaded out into the outside world—the hot light of the sun banging against shoulder as I walked.

I searched everywhere for that horned little bastard. I even checked the local white and yellow pages and called my operator. But no one knew where I could find him. Either that or they assumed I had some strange mental problem. Don’t know why that’d be. Sometimes, everyone in the world’s crazy—except for me, of course.

One day, while I was walking and taking a break from my Satanic search, a guy slammed into me, breaking his run and chucking me to the ground. My back made a little crunch when the guy fell on me. “What the hell?” I threw him off me and shot up onto my feet, dusting myself off. “Watch where you’re going.” I said, turning around, about to walk away.

The guy sprang to his feet snatched my shoulder with his thick, vice-grip hand. “Hold on. I’ve been looking for you,” he said, “Mr. Mancini.”

I faced him. I felt the blood leave my face. “Do I know you?”

“Sure, Jerry. Of course you do. At least you should. I know you quite well.” He dusted the sleeves of his dark cherry shirt and played with its collar.

“Yeah? Then who the hell are you?”

“Oh, oh, come on, Jerry. Is that anyway to talk to an old chum? Especially a chum that can help you out right now.”

“Who are you?” My face reddened brighter than his damn shirt.

A comb slipped from his sleeve and into his hand. He combed back his long, black hair and passed his hand through his soft-grown Jesus beard. “Let’s say I’m a man of wealth and taste.” He grinned. But something in that grin could make a roomful of people wince and shudder like I did just now. I don’t know what the hell it was.

“But enough of the introductions, Jer. They say you’ve been looking for me. Well, here I am.”

I shook my head, just to make sure I was awake. I wasn’t as much angry as I was confused. “How could I look for someone that I’ve never met or heard of?”

“They tell me you have marital problems. I’m a marriage counselor. Here’s my card.”

He handed me a thin white card with the words Luke E. Ferr, Marriage Counselor in bold red print with a phone number and email address sprawling beneath it.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know if this is some kind of damn sick joke. But my wife’s—”

“—Dead? I know. I think we can fix a small problem like that. Nagging is a tougher issue, you know. Not to mention more common. And it’s like a damn cold—you just can’t cure nagginess. You think a dead wife is bad, try a naggy one.”

“Is this a—?”

A long thin grin wrapped around his cheeks. He looked like a twelve-year old on his birthday. Or a teenager that’s about to get laid. “A joke? No. Not at all. Do I look happy to you?”

“Um…”

“Look, I’ll be frank. Do want your wife back or not?”

I glared at him, silent, examining him. His thin childish grin never faded for an instant. His eyes looked as cherry red as his shirt in the sunlight. I didn’t say a word.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” The man in red snapped his fingers. A thin booklet of paper sprung from his hand like flowers from a magician’s sleeve. He flicked-out a pen from his breast pocket. “Just sign here.”

He handed me the pen and with a slender knobby finger pointed to the thin black line with the ‘X’ beside it. I put the pen between my fingers and drew it near the paper. I told myself to stop and read it. But I just wouldn’t, I wanted to sign that paper and I didn’t know why exactly. I glanced at the red-man again. His eyes were fixed on my hand. His grin remained frozen on his face like an idiot’s tongue to a cold flagpole. His eyes shone bright red.

I pressed the pen against the white sheet. My hand flowed atop it without a thought; the slender black ink fell upon the page. Before I could look twice, my name was scribbled on the line.

The guy swiped them from my hands like lobbyists swipe money from gullible citizens. I felt lighter. My head started to throb, and my chest felt like it’d been beaten in by an army of sledgehammers. I just wanted to collapse and take a long, long nap.

The guy smiled. “You won’t regret this.” He laughed heartily. “Well, you might. But as they say: no refunds!”

My head felt like it had a techno-blaring nightclub on top of it. I clutched my head and rubbed my eyes. I looked again and he was gone. But I still heard his laugh thinly in the distance. My legs gave out, and I felt tired—exhausted for no reason. My knees buckled—I was on the ground, face down, drooling. The gray sidewalk slowly swirled to a thick black.




I looked around me, half-expecting to be lying on a dusty sidewalk and half-trampled-to-death by passer-bys. Instead I found myself in my bedroom, lying in bed, sweating.

“Something wrong, honey?”

I recognized that voice. That was her voice. I looked over my side. A blonde, short-haired girl was lying in bed next to me. She was the most beautiful girl in the entire universe.

I couldn’t help but stare silently at her, watching her breathe and stare back at me.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? Never seen a girl before?”

I smiled at her. She still had that cutting sense of humor. My God, she’s real. But I still couldn’t buy it. I had to feel for myself. I had to feel her. I hugged her. Her skin felt so warm against mine—I felt the blood rush in her veins and her nerves coursing with bright blue bolts of electricity and her neurons shooting endorphins through her brain. I felt her down to the atoms. She was real.

“Yeah, Jerry, I’m real. I know. After all, you sold your soul for me; you might as well get the real deal. I mean Christ, while you were at it, you should’ve sold the house for a lifetime supply of Snickers bars. You idiot.”

I felt my fingers turn to icicles. My whole body went stiff and cold like a giant ice cube. “What’s that?”

“What? Think I wouldn’t notice the change of scenery? This ain’t exactly Heaven, you know.”

“But how—”

“How wasn’t I supposed to know? And another thing—you’re a bloody retard. I hope you know that.”

“But I—I—I—I sold my soul to bring you back! Aren’t you the least bit happy to see me?”

“No! I mean—don’t get me wrong or nothing, you’re great and all, but you’re not exactly eternal happiness. I mean really. Nothing could ever compare to what I saw up there. It was great, you would’ve loved it. I swear it makes Disneyworld look like a craphole.”

But I couldn’t help it. My throat choked up. My cheeks felt warm and wet. I hiccupped and the taste of salt filled my mouth. “I don’t understand.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and caressed my back gently, almost motherly.

“Jerry, you were unhappy. Big deal. That would’ve ended eventually. Some time, some day. Maybe some years. But eventually. Then we could’ve been together. For a very, very, very long time. For forever. But what now? We go at it for a few hours and call it a night? And I lose you forever. You go off to hell.” She started to choke up too. Soon enough the tears jerked out of her like urine from a guy with a grossly enlarged prostate. “You always were an idiot.”

Yeah, so that was nice and touching. For about the first hour. Then it got old. Fast. I mean really—you can only guilt a guy so much before he wants to punch you in the face. So, after about seven weeks of this ‘Heaven was paradise’ bullshit and ‘Earth doesn’t come close to it’ crap-sack, I decided to do something about it.

So, we took a ‘romantic’ trip to New York City. We visited a lot of places there that were both useless and expensive. Finally, we went up to the Empire State Building. We took the elevator to the roof and stood on it, hand-in-hand, near the edge.

“The city view’s beautiful from up here. But it’s still nothing compared to the beauty and splendor of the City of God.”

“Really?” I replied with a grinned swirling on my face. “Tell me what the view’s like when you get there.”

I put my hands behind her back and shoved her. She fell right off the edge. She shrieked shrilly but magnificently as she rushed to the Earth at about 32 feet a second. She always did have a great pair and a full bag of wind on her. The discordant melody silenced. The composer didn’t end the piece with a bang—but with a very messy splat. She was all over pavement—so pink and red and pasty I barely even recognized her. But she was in Heaven now. May she nag in peace now. I looked to the sky. “I hope you’re happy now,” I whispered to a pigeon that happened to be flying by.

No one else was there but me. I peered over my shoulder. I was wrong. No one except the man in red. He stood silently and glared at me, his childish grin never fading.

I looked upon my hands again.

“Damn it.”

The man in red grinned and chuckled softly.

“Like I said—a nagging wife is worse than a dead one. By the way, no refunds. You broke her; you bought her.”

“Damn it.”