Men never seemed as impressed with well-done hair and nails as they were by my ability to use a nail gun, and that continued right up until the moment I put a couple of nails through Jared’s heart. He was building some bookshelves in the garage when I saw the text come in from Cheri, and maybe if it had been a weekday and I’d had some time to think about it and cool down, things would have been different. Instead it was a bright, sunny Saturday morning and I was about to head out to the farmer’s market in a breezy yellow sundress when I walked out there and heard the air compressor humming and I picked it up and shot before I thought better of it.
The human heart is not quite where you think it is.
Afterwards, I changed into an even more revealing sundress and put on my brightest red lipstick, heading out to the market like usual. I wanted to make sure every person who saw me shopping noticed me, so that when I came home and found my poor husband after his unfortunate nail gun accident, everyone would remember where I’d been.
Remember, they did: I sampled cheeses made from local cows and the new craft bourbon distilled in an old barn; I squeezed handmade sock puppets and fondled skeins of yarn; I bought an artisanal sourdough loaf that oh-so-charmingly rolled out of my reusable bag when I dropped it in shock after stumbling on the scene back home. Small-town cops wouldn’t know a crime scene if it bit them on the nose. I’d thrown away the yellow sundress at the market and intentionally poked myself in the eye with my mascara, so my eyes were sufficiently red and watery as the police only dared to ask the gentlest of questions.
I miss him, sometimes.
Afterwards, my neighbors left so many casseroles on my doorstep that I had trouble returning all the crock ware to the right person. Cheri and her husband brought a lasagna, which I dumped straight into the trash. I got myself a new kitten and a bunch of batteries and life carried on.
Some days, I think about how there was no pool of blood underneath. I guess when the heart stops right away, there’s not enough blood pressure to keep things pumping out onto the floor. I think about how things had gotten a bit stale in our second decade of marriage, and why couldn’t I just let her have her time with him. I could have taken a roll in the hay – literal or figurative – with someone like Jim, the farmer I bought my eggs from, who I could see looking, or maybe that nice young man Brendon, who was old enough, who sold the yarn.
Mostly I think about how the same tools we use to build are also used to destroy. And that bookshelf will never be finished.
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Stephanie King is a past winner of the Quarterly West Novella Prize and the Lilith Short Fiction Prize, with stories also appearing in CutBank, Entropy, and Ghost Parachute. She received her MFA from Bennington and serves on the board of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. You can find her online at stephanieking.net or whichever is the most recent social media site as @stephstephking
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