Women’s Intuition

by Evann Normandin

 

[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]

 

I fiddled with my ring and watched the back of Luke’s head while he spoke to the flight attendant at the front in halting Chinese. She smiled. Documents changed hands. He slid into the seat next to me and his thigh clung to my bare leg longer than it should have before he pulled away. “What did you tell her?” I asked.

“I said that my wife is afraid of flying. She moved us up in the plane.” He flashed two new tickets. I felt the Xanax start to kick in. My wife.

I’d bought the rings deep underground in a market of flashing neon lights and stiff, gem-encrusted shoes and handbags just steps from Metro 1 in the city center. I picked a bold almost-too-big-to-be-real cubic zirconia and a simple silver band for Luke while the saleswoman oohed, ahhed, and refused to negotiate prices. On the way to the airport, I pulled out two blue-velvet ring boxes. “Thank you for pretending,” I said, flexing my long fingers so the colorless stone might catch the light.

Luke held me by my fingertips to get a better look. “It’s nice,” he said. “I don’t think I would have picked it.” He plucked the thick silver band from its case and let it slip down his fourth finger.

“A little big,” I said.

Luke broke into a smile that lit him from the inside. “Almost perfect.”

I told him I’d booked the villa without air conditioning on purpose. Luke could smell the lie in the sweat that eeked through my thin green t-shirt—the same shirt I was wearing the day I’d learned my time was up. The air in Shanghai had been thick and heavy and I was unpracticed in navigating the city alone. The doctor was brief. The scans reminded me of a carelessly planted garden.

“Thailand,” I’d said, the moment I opened the door to our seventh-floor walkup. “I want to go back to Thailand.”

“Thailand.” Luke said. “Why?”

That night as the jungle pressed against the open windows and Luke pressed into me I wondered whether the passing of time might be ceremonial the way the ancients thought. Not the modern world’s graceless obedience to sequence and increment, but the stunning imperfection of human memory and the movements of heavenly bodies. Perhaps this was the same moon that shone through the plastic shades in our cramped dorm when I first ran my hands down Luke’s smooth chest and fumbled with his clip-latch belt buckle. And perhaps this was the same breeze that pulled my thin hair from its tight bun the first time he’d kissed me before the sun went down. Perhaps yesterday we’d had that wedding I’d always been too nervous to wish for in my father’s musty barn, with warm cider, crisp wine, and an iPod on shuffle. Maybe tomorrow I had already told Luke I was dying.

 

Evann Normandin lives in Massachusetts and works in educational publishing. Her writing has appeared in Broadway World, Rewire News, and Slush Magazine. She completed her BA at Middlebury College in English with a focus on literature of trauma and traumatic memory, and her MSc at the University of Edinburgh in English with a focus on trauma and post-apocalyptic fiction.

 

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