Rubber

Lucy appeared in our bedroom like a ghost. She was scared. “What are you afraid of, sweetie face?” Guinevere queried, the sympathetic one of our parenting duo. Consciousness makes me irritable. “This,” she said and revealed in her tiny little hand a green frog made of rubber. “The frog? You’re afraid of the little frog?” Lucy nodded, and in the act of this admission, her whole sad face tightened and a single tear tracked down each of her perfect cheeks.

“I’m. I’m afraid that it’s real.”

My wife is an oncology nurse. Her day to day life entails walking people gently into their good nights. She hears their last stories, laughs with them, cries with them, hugs them as they lay dying when they are unable to bid farewell to their loved ones stuck in traffic. My wife is a saint. Where she works there is a brilliant doctor. He’s on the verge of curing cancer. He lives in a mansion on top of a big hill that looks down on us all. He is intelligent and funny and he looks like Patrick Dempsey. His penis is a monstrous serpent that makes a mockery of my ridiculous penis. One day he asks my wife for a chart and their eyes lock and he is struck dumb like I was when I saw her for the first time in that bookstore. Suddenly, his life revolves around her. It’s even hard to focus on curing cancer. I stop shaving and bathing and I take to drinking heavy. I pick up the kids on weekends and every other Wednesday to have dinner at T.G.I.Fridays. When I drop them off at the mansion on top of the big hill that looks down on us all, my wife refuses to answer the door. The doctor answers. He wears no shirt and has rock hard abs. We shake hands. He’s made of rubber, but I’m afraid that he is real.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and my vivid imagination sees 4 piles of bones. We will all one day perish. When you see Jackson & Lucy rolling around, wrestling, laughing and making messes, it seems impossible to fathom. When you tickle Lucy’s belly, the sound of her laughter itself seems an airtight argument against the truth of death. But sometimes when I can’t sleep, I am haunted by these images of bones. And I wish I wish with all my might that they were only made of rubber.