Rituals
by Nicole Monaghan
They must be burning hot, my wife’s baths. On damp fall nights it’s the only thing to ease her achy joints. She submerges herself slowly, her eyes still on the wine glass adorned with “Mom” in gold rhinestones, as if that will anchor her from drowning. I console her about our daughter canceling again. It’s Thanksgiving, I say. She never liked it much. Christmas. She will want to come home then. My wife’s arm emerges from the bath like a steak cooked rare, beef-red to the wrist, where it had been under water for just seconds. She grabs her wine, and I watch her neck as she swallows once, pauses, then sips and swallows again. She’s eerily lovely to me in all her moods, even body-deep in mournful resignation. I’m not counting on Christmas, she confesses. I assure her again: Sweetheart, she’d not miss the choosing of the tree. A glaze of tears coats her eyes at my mention of our tree tradition, as if I’ve given her more hope than she can afford. As if she already knows. I grab matches from the vanity, light the candle she likes best. I need to busy my hands to fill the emptiness of knowing her sorrow, and that I’ve inadvertently deepened it. The thing I cannot tell her is that I understand I can never fill up the space our daughter is the shape of. It’s better she thinks I’m dumb to this fact. I fuss with her bath towel, push a steamy strand of hair behind her blazing ear.
Nicole Monaghan’s fiction, essays, reviews, interviews, and poetry have appeared in many journals, both online and in print. She is editor of STRIPPED, a Collection of Anonymous Flash (PS Books 2011), author of fiction collection Want, Wound (Burning River 2012), and founding and managing editor of Nailpolish Stories, a Tiny and Colorful Literary Journal. Visit her at https://writenic.wordpress.com/
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Rituals”? I wrote this piece over the 2022 holiday season, finally (a year later) working up the nerve to shoot for The Journal of Compressed and Creative Arts. I had built the story around the image of an arm emerging from a burning hot bathtub “beef-red.” That lone detail and description had come to mind intact during a bath, and I was compelled to make good use of it. With my fiction writing this is often the order of things: phrases or images I like, and then I invent the story to include them. Aside from that, I’m sure some details of the female character were loosely based on myself–I drink wine, have been gifted wine glasses by my children, experience joint pain, and take exceedingly hot baths. But the focus as I spun this tiny tale had become to portray a wife’s disappointment through her husband’s eyes and to reveal his feelings as he sees her in a familiar pattern of pain. Whatever the implied history the couple share relative to their daughter, I found myself most concerned with uncovering nuances of how the two characters react differently, her need to stew in sadness and his need to pretend he can help ease it.
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