The Places She Missed

He’d been with Hector the one-testicled elephant for years, but not in that way. She was his one and only. But when she shaved her beard to fit in with the other women in the neighborhood, he cried.

They had been married for three years, two months. Enough time, the monkey-boy had told him, to want to join the circus again and be the shovel boy for the two fish-sisters. It wouldn’t be like that for him, he’d said. He thought of the last time he kissed her face and felt her hairs stick in his teeth. It made each ounce of his finely striated muscles shiver.

She nodded at the garbage can. “You forgot to take the trash out,” she said. She wore an apron over her jeans, and a pink blouse that buttoned at the neck. He wore his extra-extra large shirt from the Gap, but it itched him. He wished he could take it off, but she had bought it for him, said it made him look like he could be in sales, or a golfer.

He looked at her for any hint of a five-o-clock shadow. “I’ll do it tomorrow.” He could lift it with his little finger, the same way he lifted his weights, but he pretended it was too much work. Life was like that. He turned away and began to rummage through the mail. Mostly junk mail and free credit card offers. A postcard from the Man With Two Heads, who was vacationing in Tuscany. He separated out the bills and tossed them on the desk with the others.

She brushed past him, her smooth face grazing the tattoo on his huge bicep. But she was angry, and did not choose to linger. Instead she started working, like she always did when she didn’t want him around.

All this was strange to him. He had gotten used to the superhuman strength, just as all the circus freaks had lived with the normality of their own deformities. But how do you learn to live with a woman?

He watched her at the sink, washing dishes. The shine had left her hair, and she kept it now in a tight bun, never loose and flowing like how he used to love it. With the beard, he’d said, it made her look like Jesus. Now she looked like a housewife. Her soft curves merged with the lines of the plates, the counters. Three years, and they were slowly becoming invisible to each other.

“It’s too hard to keep this place clean,” she said. She undid the buttons at her neck and wrists, rolled up her sleeves, and tucked her shirt better under the apron.

He grunted, knowing she wasn’t saying what she was saying, was saying more or less, or something just right that he didn’t understand. “We need to fix the refrigerator.”

“I start work on Thursday.”

He’d forgotten. Or maybe she hadn’t told him. It was hard to tell these days.

He pushed the stack of bills away from their wedding picture. They were married at the side show. Him in his giant suit, her with her beard curled in ringlets, standing next to the Siamese twins who were best man and maid of honor. They were happy.

He missed the wildness, the rough scent of their bodies in the heat of Summer as they courted in the side show. He had lifted cars to impress her, and she made a game of tickling him with her face from behind. Why they traded that in for tailored clothes and shaving gel, he didn’t know.

Back then he thought he could do anything.

Beads of water trickled down her arms onto the ground. He closed his eyes and remembered. She had feet like a goddess, small and perfectly shaped. He could hold both in one large hand. What he loved most, though, was the warm smell behind her knees.

He was the strong man. He could do this. He held in his mind who she was, who he was, beneath what the years had made them.

Sometimes she receded, and he could see only her smooth face. Still, he knew, there were places she missed and these excited him. He opened his eyes. He walked to her, gently lowered the edge of her collar and kissed her hairy neck.

He reached into his heart and lifted away the years.