Free Strange Cowboy by Sam Michel Page A

arm, should our making love compel my wife to bite, or scratch, or gnash her
     teeth, destructively, the uppers on the lowers. We get her “all set up.” I pat her
     on the bottom. She quivers, ripples fatly from the lumbar to the shoulderblade, the
     shank down to the kneecap. I prod, searching for the crease in her of least resistance.
     She assists me, reaches back for me and guides me to the place where she would have
     me. I am had, easily, hardly sensing it, thanks to the enlargement of her orifice,
     and to the abundance of her discharge. This is highly normal. Authorites assure us
     that the woman and the man, from this time forth, may very well experience a diminution,
     in their acts of love, of feeling. To be sure, my wife may do her Kegels, or employ
     medicinal devices, there is the theory of a pre-delivery massage, as applied, professionally,
     to the perineum; but better off to not expect a miracle in corporalis, and to focus rather on the “concrete possibilities” residing in a mirror, or in the
     video cassette; better to derive our pleasures from the spousal yip, the whimper,
     groan, and scream. “Some stretches,” says the doctor, “take the snap from the elastic.”
     If he were not a man of faith, the doctor tells us, he would say the vaginal canal
     was not designed to pass an object sized, and shaped, and builded of such obdurate
     materials as those we find conspiring in the human skull. My wife and I, we understand
     this, my wife more clearly than myself. Screaming, she explains, has pleasured her
     since childhood; it would not surprise her if a scream or two from me might “tickle
     her to pieces.” For love, she thinks I ought to try at least to whimper. It wouldn’t
     hurt me, she believes. She says that I, too, must knowfrom time to time an urge to scream; I, too, when feeling lags, and the room is dark,
     and we are grappling toward the consummation of our fleshly passions, then I, too,
     must be mindful of the strain love suffers through the willed, enduring silence. My
     wife, near here, will giggle. When I return from work she tells me she is apt to “break
     up” over nothing. She says that she is so afraid. A foot, she says, is in her rib.
     Her cyst grows. So many birds, she says, what happens to them? What makes a lip a
     lip? What makes a palate cleft? Did I know a turtle lays her eggs in clutches numbering
     the hundreds? My wife sits on the bed and holds her belly. She holds her knees. She
     will not let me turn the light on. She naps, sleeps in, says her dreams repeat: abruption,
     breach, and strangulation; abruption, breach, and strangulation. Our sheets are drenched.
     Our night is short. She knows that she is being silly. She knows she shouldn’t, but
     she wonders what the odds are they will cut her. She says she wants to know just who
     on earth is Braxton Hicks, says she’d take the general over epidural, the analgesic
     over a narcotic, asks me often why the several, wretched good things in her life are
     always passing by so quickly. Oh, Lincoln, she says, Lincoln, I’m so lonely. I was seventeen once, she explains. I had time to watch the light go out of days. I liked to cheer. I thought that I would
     always have a closest friend. In lines, Lincoln, when we are standing in a line, I
     never thought that you would be a man to stand so far apart from me that anybody else
     could come between us. Go away, she says, come back, and, on a night she wakes to find me gone off from our bed, my wife will call out
     through the darkened halls that she’s got two hearts now, four lungs, Lincoln, I’ve got forty toes and fingers! Come touch, she says, come feel! Hey, Lincoln, says my wife, Lincoln, dear, where are you ? And then another night, another day, the thing is truly passed, born into another
     morning. She breaks. She floods. She deflatesbefore me, slackens out into a squalling, prunish wind. I coach her. I interpret data.
     I clock her, offer ice chips, I