When Allen proposes to me, I think I see fear in his eyes. For a second something glints momentary and sharp, like the sun hitting mica: a shiver of dread.

But everyone insists that this can only be a good sign. “Any guy would be nervous asking his girl to marry him!” My friends, my parents, my siblings, they all reassure me: “The more scared he is now, the more he’ll treasure you. You’ll see.” My sister Ethel, a wife for six months already, smiles behind her hand. It’s a secret smile, hinting at a life in a foreign country, the same one I am about to enter.

Our wedding is a simple affair: a trip to a nearby church and then a celebration outdoors, under the enormous Iowa sky. We dance and eat and drink for hours, eyes growing unfocused, laughter and shouts echoing into the late summer air. All around us stretches the earth, the fabric of our lives. These fields are so large that they seem infinite, as though you might one day stumble across anything in that vastness: animals from other countries, lost travelers, forgotten manuscripts. Another you, even, the way you might be if you had grown up somewhere else.  

The alcohol makes my brain buzz, my blood hum, keeps me dancing long past the time when I should be lying down exhausted. I can’t stop thinking: My husband, my husband, my husband. Or: I’m a wife. I’m a wife. Allen’s body is strong and lean and I can see the line of his legs, his thighs, his slim hips underneath his suit. Places I’ll get to touch now—all of him, at last. There’s a sharp, sweet taste in my mouth. The sky darkens to a cornflower blue, and then to navy, edging towards a soft black.

As the festivities die down, Allen takes my hand and tells me it’s time to go to our new house. When we reach it, he hoists me into his arms and carries me across the threshold, while I cling to his neck and shriek. He deposits me carefully in the entryway, and I’m barely lucid enough to register the place, but I promise myself I’ll pay more attention to it in the daylight, when I’m sober. Right now I’m more intent on going upstairs.

When we get there, I catch sight of us in the bedroom mirror: my dress is almost glowing in the half-night. The only light in here comes from downstairs, the soft yellow of the kitchen bleeding into the upstairs. I can barely see Allen’s face; he’s a shadow before me. I can smell the wine on his breath, and the scent of his sweat too, metallic and salty.

I tilt my head the way I’ve seen women in recent films do—Lauren Bacall, Ava Gardner—exposing the tender white flesh of my throat. “Kiss me,” I murmur. I do my best to make my voice a low and seductive purr.

He obeys and kisses me, but when I kiss him back, he pulls away and sinks down to the bed. For a moment I think I should join him, but then he raises a weary face to me.

“I think I drank too much,” he says.

“Oh.”

My body is still pulsing. It hasn’t caught up yet. My hair is messed up from the dancing, sweaty strands draped across my face.  

“I’ll be all right. Sorry. My head’s just spinning.” He puts a hand to his forehead, then moves it to cover his face. From underneath the hand comes a sigh—loud, heavy, almost affected.

I turn the new silence over in my mouth. Eventually I seize on a few words, the only ones I can think of right now: “Do you want to go to sleep?”

“Yes, let’s do that. Sorry. I don’t even know what I’m sorry for.” He laughs. “I should apologize to my parents more than anyone. They weren’t expecting their only son to get so sauced.”

I really don’t want to think about Allen’s parents right now, or anyone’s parents, for that matter. But maybe I should. Maybe it would stop the blood still coursing through my veins and rushing around my body, the blood that hasn’t realized yet that the only thing I’m going to do tonight is get a good night’s rest. The heat between my legs won’t dissipate. I feel like a record still playing after everyone has left, meaningless noise stuttering out into a deserted room.

Allen helps me unzip my wedding dress, but when I peel the innermost layers off, he looks away, as though he’d be performing some kind of violation if he didn’t.

I’m your wife, I think, my intoxicated brain slow and murky and sad. Why are you looking away?

We wash our faces and clean our teeth (or at least I do) and go to bed. He lies beside me, and I have the faint hope that maybe he’ll somehow sober up as the minutes pass, before we fall asleep. Maybe there’s still hope. We exchange a few words, but he takes longer and longer to reply each time, and his sentences grow shorter and softer. I fall silent and listen to his breathing deepen, slow down, become the breathing of sleep.

I lie curled tightly on my side, facing him, frustrated heat rippling outwards from the center of my body. Something unspirals inside me.

 __ 

It’s almost two weeks before Allen can bring himself to consummate our marriage. At first I try to figure out what I have done wrong, and then I try to figure out what might be wrong with me, and then I try to figure out what might be wrong with him. Finally I learn to stop thinking about it altogether. Or at least, I try to learn this.

I go to the town library more and more often these days. I pore over books about subjects that I’ve never really been interested in—unsolved murders, geography, molecular biology—as though I’m seeking some obscure, unexpected piece of knowledge that will change everything about my life.

One afternoon I am looking through an art book so large that you have to place it on a book holder and stand up to read it. I turn to a page with a Vincent Van Gogh painting called “Wheatfield with Crows.” I have never seen it before. I stand perfectly still, looking at it for long minutes.

The fields are a lurid and sickening yellow. Above them hangs the sky, dark blue but quickly dimming to blackness. Clouds swell against it, almost unrecognizable, like alien moons. There are three paths extending before me, but they go nowhere: either ending blindly, buried in the wheat, or trailing out of the frame. Crows flock in the distance, but there is no way for me to discern whether they are flying towards me or away from me. I cannot tell which would be worse. The paths cant up wildly, giving me a strange, vertiginous perspective, as though I am towering on an unsteady precipice.

I continue to look at the painting as though expecting something to change. Nothing changes. The three roads show no path forward. Far above the crows, the blackness of the sky remains absolute.

__

I teach children in the same classroom I did before our marriage, while Allen works in the engineering department of a car factory, planning designs and fitting the right parts into the right places. (Something I think of once, which leaves me doubled over in unhappy, half-hysterical laughter: at least the cars are getting their spaces properly filled.) Each evening he tells me about his day, and sometimes he remembers to ask about mine. When he does this, I can see that he’s genuinely trying to show an interest in my dull little life, and I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse—better because at least he’s trying, or worse because he has to try.

During the summer, when I’m off work, I pace around the fields that I used to wander as a child and a teenager and a young woman. The clouds loom like distant mountains, shadowy and immense. I imagine climbing into them and sitting cradled inside, huddling in their damp interiors, surrounded by the ghost of rain.

Beneath them the low fields stretch into infinity. I find myself wondering what I might find in them, if they really were infinite: another me, perhaps, with different choices and accomplishments, my life divergent in a few small but essential ways.

I walk home in the incipient darkness. Time is a circle, a closed loop.

_________________________

Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, HAD, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Monkeybicycle, Atticus Review, and other journals. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books in September 2024.

ART:
Stephanie Phillips
Clinton (TN)
iPhone XR, 2021