Shattering

The man becomes a dolphin in her dreams. Only briefly, he is a shining silver arc above her, and then, when his hips push down between her legs he’s a man again. The air is bright around him. His shoulders are rounded, his eyes closed, his mouth is open, gasping.

She had thought he looked weathered when she first saw him, too tired for handsome. She didn’t know when it happened, exactly, when it was that she began to think the deep grooves on either side of his mouth were beautiful. His hair is like hers, the kind of brown that used to be blonde. She has trouble remembering his eyes, though. What color his eyes are. She mostly thinks they are blue, but then everything about him seems brown—his hair, his skin—weathered brown, and so she thinks of his eyes as if they are brown too.

She is sure of her husband. Everyone tells her he is handsome. She knows he is.

She wakes and feels her husband’s hand, warm on her stomach. She inhales and puts her hand on his. “You were dreaming,” he says. He moves closer to her, puts his arm over her, around her, tucks his hand between her shoulder blade and the bed. She lays still. He’ll never ask, not with words. Instead he presses his head against her neck, his nose on her shoulder, and then is still. His breath fans out warm on her skin and she wonders, when did this happen? When did she begin having to force herself to turn to face him, to put a hand on top of his after he had already reached for her? She knows how it will be, exactly what he will do, but she turns toward him anyway out of pity or because there was something left of love, and he smiles.

The snow is deep and forces her to look where she is walking. Closer to the store, she slows down and stops, so she can look up at the windows. The man is there, head bent over his work. It can only be him, even at this distance. The rapid line from shoulder to hip, the hinge of his jaw. She watches him and her breathing turns shallow. She is shaking. She begins walking toward the store again before he sees her just standing there.

He looks up when the door opens, and smiles. “Hi there,” he says. He is looking squarely at her, more than he needs to just to be friendly.

“It’s so cold today,” she says, to make him look up again from his clipboard. “Must be good to be inside.”

“Cold?” he says, “Nah.”

“Sure it’s cold. It was this cold and this snowy every single winter where I grew up. I’m just not used to it anymore.”

“You got spoiled,” he says, and she laughs loudly, taking a basket.

“Yes, I suppose I did.”

Milk, purple grapes, a block of cheese, crackers for her boys, all in one bag. He’s still near the door when she’s leaving, curling his sheets of paper over the top of the clipboard. When he takes the pen out of his mouth to smile and nod good-bye, she drops her eyes, afraid suddenly of the way she would look at him if she could touch his face.

It was supposed to have been enough. When she’d stood in the church to marry her husband and her dress had rustled like dry leaves caught in a rake, she had said it would be enough. Now she stops in her sons’ bedroom doorway most nights to listen to their rasping sleep. This bubble of childhood they lie in, unguarded, is supposed to be enough. She knows, standing here, that she’s meant to be fearful of what lies beyond her control, grateful that, for now, they are safe. Instead she’s mourning what she became when she realized that better and worse and sickness and health had turned out only to be words.

It had come as a surprise to her, sitting on...