Free The Journey Prize Stories 27 by Various Page B

you can point definitively to The Moment Everything Changed. We could do that.
    Palming a piece of bread into a tiny ball, I threw it across the table and at his chest. I pretended his chest was the universe, that the ball of bread was a missile with such potential for catastrophe that it would end all moments. The bread ball bounced into his glass of water. We both looked at it sadly as the water molecules slowly pulled it apart, the bread falling open like a strange underwater flower you needed grief to discover.
    After a few tests, a few rounds of chemotherapy, the oncologists sent my husband home. The reasoning was that if he was going to die, he might as well do it somewhere comfortable. It was a deadly beast, the cancer, and it was beyond reproach. So I went about trying to make him comfortable, starting with the purchase of an ounce of the highest quality marijuana I could find. The dealer, a college student from the apartment complex across the street, said to take it easy, that a gram of the stuff would take me to outer space. Good, I told him. The rings of Saturn sounded very hospitable at that moment.
    In the early stages of our courtship, my husband and I would smoke a bit of pot on the porch and watch for patterns in the stars to announce themselves to our scrambled minds. Since then, he had gotten a job teaching at a private high school and couldn’t find room in his life for drugs.
    “You’re smoking it,” I said handing him the joint. “We’ll go back in time to four years ago when we first met.”
    He saluted grimly. “Then as now, you’re the boss.”
    I wrapped his shawl tight around his body and lit the joint where it dangled, between his chapped lips. His eyelids fluttered when he sucked in and he coughed out a cloud that hung in the air like a fist. “Goddamn,” he said. “That hits you right in the brain.”
    “If you could have one wish,” I said, sucking in my own lungful of smoke, “other than having more wishes, what would it be?”
    “More genies.”
    “That’s addressed in the contract, section one B. No extra genies.” I replaced the joint on his waiting lips. Its glowing tip lit him up in a pleasant way, like a wet drawing of a sunset, near translucent, patted down over the contours of his face. It was a calm, safe thing. His eyes got milky, the lids at half-mast.
    “You really want to know?”
    “What kind of a wife would I be if I didn’t want to know?”
    So my husband said to me, “I wouldn’t mind getting laid.”
    “Your wish,” I said, putting my hand on his leg, “is my command.”
    Which ended up being a natural transition to my husband telling me that he meant he wanted to sleep with a man.
    There are pictures you have of people you love, a kind of X-ray that you think reveals their inner lives and shines it bright on the wall like a kabuki shadow puppet play. And then, when the curtain is pulled back and the puppets behind it look nothing like the images you had imagined, you’re forced to pick up the Lego blocks of reality and rebuild them in a manner you can live with.
    He saw my expression and let the joint fall out of his mouth. It landed on the shawl and sparked until we both frantically patted it out. Our hands met a few times, violent with slapping sounds. Once we’d beaten the joint into a stubbly mess, I took out a spare I’d rolled in case the first one suffered a premature death.
    I handed him the replacement joint and asked him, the way you’d talk to someone hard of hearing, “Repeat what you just said.”
    “What did I just say?”
    “That you want to sleep with a man. Is that what you said? Did I hear you right?”
    He frowned. “I thought you knew.”
    Did I know? I might have known. There were signs. Then again, if you told me my husband had been a closet uni-bomber, I could have found signs supporting that claim as well. He was anti-social sometimes. He was the only person I knew who liked licking the glue on envelopes. If I’m not