By Avital Gad-Cykman.
When he woke up he chose a bedcover of a different color every day. I should have suspected his priorities, but I thought he was being an architect.
He moved me from place to place, to fit the space and the arrangement of the furniture. I curled on the couch until he sat me on an easy chair, splashed me the table, lay me on our bed, or asked me to act according to my senses and find my place.
I breathed his breath.
Once, I asked him why he chose me and not anyone beautiful, and he said that beauty existed in angles the way music burst out of silence.
It made me feel special. “I’m glad you don’t need to change me,” I said.
He laughed. His swimming-pool blue irises lit the fine wrinkles around his eyes, as if his laughter overflowed.
He told me stories. “You know,” he said, “I was so used to the plains of Holland, that when I went skiing in the Alps, I fainted, and when I did a trek in the Himalayas, I had a height sickness, and when I climbed the Andes, I became dizzy as if I’d been anesthetized.”
His wiry arms made broad gestures, drawing the heights and depths of places outside.
“But you, you’re a force of nature,” he said and straightened my neck.
It was a free morning, so I felt the room and sat on a stool beside the TV set, my legs and arms angled in diamond shapes.
He nodded with satisfaction and covered the bed in silver. It was a cold day, and I shivered in my short-sleeved bride dress.
“Why do you want us to live in a penthouse?” I asked.
His laughter spilled over. Altitude was the most important thing in the world.
“Why?”
“It suits us!” he said, exhausting every possible answer.
He looked pale in the elevator, but was dashing in his suit. I had never seen such a wondrous golden cloud of hair like his.
“Are you well?” I asked since he seemed shaken.
“I’ve been to the roof of the world, so I can’t complain here.”
“I think that the older we get, the more sensitive we become.”
“When it’s over, it’s over. Worrying won’t thicken the air.”
One day, he’d evaporate like ether.
We continued with grace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avital Gad-Cykman lives on an island off the coast of Brazil with her family and other 300,000 people. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as McSweeney’s, Michigan Quarterly Review, Stumbling and Raging, Sex for America, The Flash, and many others. She has completed one novel and three quarters of another.
