1000 words from
Every Possible Horrible Happiness
Racks of human skeletons were mass-produced in plastic and shipped to the hardware store for Halloween. They’re good specimens, as far as I can tell, though “lifelike” is not the right word. There is a range of sizes with skulls the size of tennis balls, skulls the size of crock pots, skulls the size of skulls. Hanging at my eye-level are skeletons about five feet tall, 155 cm, naked-er than naked and swaying together like a bead curtain.
It takes both of my hands, 54 living bones, to extricate the plastic ankle of the first skeleton on the rack from that of her sister hanging behind her. Untangled, she dangles from my finger by a vinyl ring threaded through the crown of her head. Eye to eye socket, I palm my own cranium, measuring my size against hers.
“Come here. I need you to see something.”
My husband wheels an empty shopping cart into the aisle, dismayed, maybe, but not surprised to find the pair of us standing together on the dirty white tiles. The skeleton smiles big for him, for and in behalf of me, who is covered to the eyes in an N95 mask.
“Am I taller than her? I am, right? Hold her up to me.”
He is looking off into the foam pumpkins as I pass her from my hand to his. “No.”
“What? She can’t be shorter than me.”
“It’s not. You’re the same height.”
“Like, exactly?”
“Yeah. Of course you are. And we’re not getting one.”
I agree to nothing, reaching after her as he straightens his arm, lifting her higher and higher, her feet kicking lightly, plausibly accidentally at my abdomen.
Oh, so it’s like that.
I slide the next skeleton-sister in line from the rod. She’s docile enough to let me lay her arm against mine, marking its length, tracing the seams of her bones. Moulded from beige plastic, she is nearly weightless, her parts fused together and spray painted with a radium-green patina to show that she is for fun, not forensics. Her teeth are better than mine, like she must have worn her dental retainers longer than I did, through all her pregnancies, when her hormones would have loosened her ligaments. Feet to pelvis to teeth, everything ever so slightly elastic, making her into something that could be lived through, survived.
No argument, no laughter, my husband slips the second skeleton out of my grip, not settling her into our shopping cart but depositing her back onto the display rod, hooked and hanged with the rest of the bone-wives.
“Come on. The birdseed’s two aisles over.”
I might be leaving the store with only the bones I brought with me, but this isn’t over. I’m stalking her, monitoring the store website, watching as their stock of five foot plastic skeletons steadily depletes, migrating from the stores to the suburbs.
Still, it isn’t me but our youngest son who spots my skeleton in a spectacular front yard Halloween display on his flier delivery route. We go together to see her standing in a homemade cardboard coffin painted black and cut down to my size.
“Is that the right one? Is that your skeleton, Mum?”
Yes. She is right and rightly me to all of us now, exposed on a fall evening, without her sisters, shoeless in a box, upright. She was not the image of my imminent death but of my advanced death, slightly green, slightly festive, a death they had lived through, survived, as the obituary will say.
What can I do but laugh, leaning back into my husband as he pushes me along the sidewalk, away from her?
By now, all but one of the ten hardware stores in our city has sold out of my skeleton. I would have to drive for the better part of an hour, but I could still get her.
“No.”
“She’s not scary. She’s me.” The banter of a long, comfortable marriage—that’s all it is.
“No.”
“Okay, fine. I won’t put her on display. I won’t even tell you I have her. She’ll be just for me. Hidden…”
We are at our front door, about to go walking without the kids, in the dark, in the cold. He won’t laugh back at me. He is bending toward me, slow, pressing his forehead to mine, cranium to cranium, pressure tipping my head back, my parietal bone against the drywall behind me. My arms lose their tension, elbows slack, hands still clasping the shoe I haven’t put on yet.
His face fills my vision, voice quiet but silencing everything. “What would I do with it, how would I get rid of it, how could I keep it after you die?”
There is no plastic skeleton in our house.
But when he remembers the scuffle in the front hall, will he wish he’d held me to the wall a little longer, until we’d made another oath, one more covenant, one about a moulded plastic skeleton?
Because this man will outlive me. It is a fact so simple it exists as a single real number, the SMR, the standardized mortality ratio readable in the databases of the medical school attached to my university. For the death of every individual in a population of women my age in my country, there will be 1.38 deaths among the subgroup of women who share my autoimmune disease. The excess .38 of the lifetime I would have had without my disease—what wouldn’t I do to make those years of this man’s lifetime belong to no one else but me?
My husband knows this. And after I’m gone, will he be able to trust me not to have bought the skeleton, or will he live braced for the shock of my monstrosity every time he opens a forgotten box in the basement, or runs his hand along the high shelves in the cold room? Will he spend the final 0.38 of our mismatched lifespans wondering when my store-bought bones will come clattering out of hiding, all full of hinges and tackling him in the punchline of my longest, darkest joke?
Would it be kinder to plot a resolution for him, rush at the mistrust, and order the skeleton? Yes, the 155cm one, with the radium patina. Hide her indoors and low to the floor, reducing as much of her potential energy as possible. Stow her in a box marked “Misc” in my own handwriting, so they’ll know I was the one to seal it up. Wrap her in a blanket so her form will be palpable though not immediately visible. Identify her with a note, letters large and black, indelible and fragrant with xylene, legible as soon as the cardboard flaps part.
“You’ve found her. Now rest.”
When I lost my father in May 2020, there was nothing, which thing I had never supposed. Otherwise helpless, I wrote and wrote as I came to feel again, broaching, approaching nothing with something, two characters I already knew, a husband and wife from a novel I wrote a decade ago. In this iteration of these characters, their roles are reversed. It is the wife who is the deathly one of the pair this time. She is also this book’s voice and, compared to the earnest understatement of her husband’s storytelling, she talks too much, is too much—like a Lana Del Rey song disjointed with spoken-word bridges on Sinitic typography and immuno-pharmacology. This is my work in progress, and its most recent title is Every Possible Horrible Happiness based on competing readings of the cursive of Virginia Woolf’s last letter to her husband. If no one wants this book, I will still have needed to write it. Yes, it may go too far into our sacred, too far out of fiction. I wrote it with my guts, on my guts, on a machine open on my stomach, all of me swaying suspended in a hammock between two enormous evergreens. Tucked beneath my waist was a paperback of The Waves becoming sticky with spruce sap, something to feel when I held it, maybe eternally tacky, maybe turning to amber. 🕮