Bokeh Effect (Rough Draft)

Saturday meant no work, although he had been trying to rise early in the morning to avoid the humidity and the heat of the day that seemed to seep in earlier and earlier, even though it was September, and technically fall, when the leaves were supposed to turn orange, yellow, and brown.  But those trees didn’t exist in Texas, only the short, lone kind, with boring light flowers, which, when spent, fell to the ground, and were trampled upon in a brown-grey mush.

Beside him, his lump of a wife lay.  He had noticed recently that her hips had started bursting at the seams, that her rear-end had exploded, had become lumpy and soft, and that she had suddenly become disproportionate, that her top half of her body, her torso, and more particularly, her chest, did not match her large bottom half, the meaty thighs which reminded him of legs of mutton munched upon English kings of old. 

She had cropped all of her hair off in a bold move one day which made her seem even more bottom heavy.  It was a popular haircut with older women, something he never understood.  He even expressed his dislike of the haircut to his wife, expressing how the shaved head and the short hair on top made them look more manly.  It was perhaps that he saw the haircut a blurring of the lines of the roles of sexes, a kind of confusion of identity, which, as he was reluctant to admit, something he had his own struggles with.  Not that he was homosexual, he wasn’t.  Only, he was a male, surrounded by females in his life, his wife, his two young demanding daughters, his female boss, and the other females in the office, it was little surprise that he felt hostility towards the estrogen filled world he lived in, one in which he constantly felt like he had to assert himself, to claim a corner for himself.

And then, one day, he came home, and the shoulder length hair that his wife had been sporting since they were young college students, who happened to meet at a mutual friend’s dinner, had been clipped and discarded, a kind of uncovering, a revelation of something, something, something different, foreign, mysterious, strange, new, scary…

He rolled up next to his wife, placing his excitement against her back, his way of trying to tell her that he was interested in fooling around, he placed his arm around her warm body, moving his hand slowing up the large shirt she wore to bed and grabbed the flat breast that lay there.  He moved his fingers along the nipple to telegraph to her that she should turn over and allow him to kiss her, to allow him to separate her legs and for him to enter her. 

But she just mumbled something through her sleep, and he relented.  It wasn’t like they were going to get that far anyway.  They hadn’t been intimate in a long time, since the last child who was now almost six.  She showed no interest in it as if mother nature had given her a pass on that part of life, that the biological urge to procreate had been removed from her.  It was a secret that she held, he knew it, something in her, that explained her reluctance, which she never revealed to him. 

In the past, they had been like rabbits, spending whole days in bed, making amorous, dirty love.  But those days were gone, dissolved like dreams.

He rolled back on his back and turned on the television set and turned on the local news.  His wife released a large flatuance, and then groaned, as if to say, excuse me.  His excitement had evaporated.

“I have to get up and run,” he said to himself.  He was a healthy two hundred and ten pounds, all of which sat on his five foot eight frame like thick folds.  Whenever he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw a bulldog, a neutered bulldog, large, sad eyes with deep circles under them, a pair of long jowls hanging down.  He had been trying for weeks to remove the weight, but was only half successful, making excuses for himself for not getting out of bed in the morning, destroying the gains he obtained by stuffing his face with all kinds of foods loaded with calories, by ignoring the sad fact that this was something he needed help with.

He put his feet on the floor and went to the bathroom where he pulled out the scale he bought when he said he had enough of feeling sorry for himself.  He stood on it and saw the wavering needle, hovering over two hundred ten pounds.  He shuffled his feet again, making the needle move with the idea that he was not standing on the scale in the right way.  But when the needle stopped moving, it hovered again on two hundred ten pounds. 

That was his life, the shuffling, a movement to get out of the rut, but when the needle fell, it fell always in the same place, the groove in an album with a scratch.