Water Moccasin

When my husband left he took his baking paraphernalia, my dad’s Navajo rugs, and the studded tires I’d given him for his fortieth. I dialed down the thermostat first thing. A warm-weather southern boy, he’d married a person who wore flip-flops year-round all her childhood, through snow to the car and back again, yet I’d permitted him to sauna our house all this time, dutifully paying my half of the bloated electric to those awful energy companies. The whole morning I shook from room to room, chain-smoking marijuana, admiring the dark rectangles of wood and carpet where for years my dad’s rugs protected them from the sun.

I’d known he was seeing someone, probably costing her a fortune in heating bills. Maybe I’m the idiot, but I’d thought of her fondly. She’d been kind to the person I loved, wrung out his big sex drive and hung him up to dry for me so that we could speak plainly, person to person, over green spinach spätzle or semolina pastas he rolled flat and pressed by hand, which he’d learned from his grand-father in Tuscaloosa.

I can tell you I would certainly have appreciated having my own relations, had I the drive to politely sneak outside the marriage. Even so, some dull, maybe socially encoded thing in me reared up and told my husband to cut out.

________

It wasn’t until a few days later I noticed he’d forgotten his favorite pet, a sourdough starter which fed once a week, like the water moccasins of his homeland of Alabama. More ancient, he claimed, than both of us combined. Big whoop, I’d said. Now, the gravity of our years together alongside this starter had something in me kicking off its shoes.

I retrieved the cold jar from the fridge and cracked the lid. The thick liquid was undrinkable, but I got most of it down by pouring little shots, one after the other, muscling through the tough moments by finding my breath. The breathing was something I’d learned from the climbing podcast I’d begun listening to for company these last few months. I was not a climber but found the chatter of the climbing acolytes — gravely driven by inexplicable devotions, given to shoulder pain and subluxation, to pulley tears and trigger-finger syndrome and other mysterious grievances — useful in the same way a nonreligious person might leave on a religious station in the car. I lay swallowing spit on the hardwood where a particularly aggressive rug had been. Trying to in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth. The rug was all whirling logs and Spider Woman crosses inside diamonds and triangles. Most weavers, I’d read, considered this configuration risky. Spider Woman was not of this world. Her spirit should never be trapped inside such forms.

Hours later, I woke from a flapping tarp of a nap and ran out into the yard. My toilet bowl was nowhere you’d want to kneel.

My husband called right away. “All right? Joe said you were doing some fertilizing out back.”

“I was not,” I said.

“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant now, too,” he said, referring to his sister, who’d just succumbed.

“Yuck,” I said.

“I forgot the starter,” he said. “I’ll come over and get it soon, so you don’t have to worry about feeding it.”

I could hear him putting dishes away.

“Sometimes I feel like you wanted me to be with someone else, like this made me more interesting to you,” he said.

I had wanted him more, for a while. That’s just plain human nature.

He was onto the cutlery now, slinking metal onto metal. I always envied his ability to wring satisfaction from the dullest thing — a fly petering around on the countertop, a tiered nurse cake he’d made with strong flour, an exchange with a stranger at the bear sanctuary we liked to visit when we drove into the next town for groceries.

I licked my finger...