“The gas.”
Arthur watches as the attendant’s previously cheerful face dissolves into a scowl.
“Okay, buddy. Where’s the hidden camera?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You will be sorry if you don’t pucker up and pay.”
Arthur has never heard ‘pucker up’ used like this before and thinks the gas station attendant must be misusing it. A more pressing concern, however, is the problem with the card. Arthur feels the sweat rising on his brow as the attendant continues to glare at him. The station must only take cash, he reasons, but, if that’s the case then why is the attendant being so aggressive? He fumbles for his wallet, digs around inside and is relieved to see that he has just enough in loose bills to cover the price of the gas.
The attendant hands him back the credit card, shakes his head in apparent distaste and returns to his duties.
Arthur stands alone in the moonlight, looking down at the credit card in his hands. There is nothing printed on the surface. It is as smooth and blank as an eggshell. He turns it over. There is no signature. No microchip.
Arthur puts it back into his wallet, gets back into the car and starts the engine. He grips the wheel tightly to stop himself from trembling.
•
Arthur sees the lights flicker on in the living room window, as he carefully reverses up the gravel drive and brings the Camaro to a halt.
Ned stands by the lawnmower, exactly where Arthur left him this morning. He has a can of Coca Cola in his hand and Arthur notes with mild disinterest that Ned has apparently shaved off his trademark beard.
“Evening, Neighbour,” says Ned.
Arthur does not answer.
The front door is already opening.
Anna beats on him with the flats of her hands as he tries to enter. Her mascara stained cheeks stand out against the shock of blonde hair that now rests where, only this morning, her dark brown locks hung. He does not like what she has done to herself, but he knows that this is not the time to say so. She listens to his rambling apologies but they seem as incomprehensible to him as to anyone else. He has driven the same route every day for the past five years and cannot explain how he came to lose his way today; how the roads seemed different and the signs to places he used to consider familiar led only to a strange, fog-infested highway with no end.
Anna screams and yells at him. She has been drinking and her words slur together. He tries to show her the blank, formless credit card, as if it will somehow explain everything, but she bats it from his hands and pushes past him up the staircase. From the top of the hall he hears their bedroom door slam shut.
Alone now, he looks around at the empty living room, noticing, for the first time, the banners that hang limply from the ceiling and the door to the kitchen. He notes the cake that sits, uneaten on the kitchen table and the empty glasses that embarrassed guests to a party that never happened have left behind them.
Arthur sits for a long time at the kitchen table turning the blank credit card over and over in his hands.
Eventually, he grows tired and creeps quietly up the staircase to brush his teeth. Before he heads to bed he opens the door to Jennifer’s room, the passageway light illuminates it just enough to avoid waking her. He wanders softly over to her bedside and looks down at her sleeping, unmoving form.
The girl in the bed is not his daughter.
It is the other girl: The girl from the dining room who smelled of freshly cut grass, who wore her hair in dark brown pigtails and poked her tongue out at him from above the drawing of a butterfly.
Arthur hears the girl’s voice in his head.
“Why are you afraid of butterflies?”
He stands unblinking in the half light, trembling over the girl’s quietly sleeping form. From next door he can already hear Anna snoring loudly.
Someday
Arthur Kovic wakes and makes love to a blonde haired woman that is not his wife.
The bedroom is the same. The wallpaper is the same design that they picked out eight years ago. The bed is the same one that they purchased and spent a day assembling, just a few summers back, but the woman now straddling him is not his wife and not the mother of his daughter, Jennifer.
After it is over, he lies in the ruins of his marital bed, mired in the disgrace of the deed. Arthur is ashamed of what he has done: Ashamed of the suppressed lust that Anna’s migraines have built up within him. He lies imprisoned and immobilised by his guilt. Eventually, he hears the radio turn on in the kitchen downstairs and Nina Simone’s voice once again rising up to greet him.
“Everything must change. Nothing stays the same. Everything must change. No-one, no-one stays the same.”
Now he can smell bacon frying on the pan. Now he can hear the crackle of the fat as it bursts and pops. Now he can hear the sounds of the woman, this stranger, this interloper, moving around downstairs and humming to herself.
He hauls his legs over the side of the mattress, and, pulling on his dressing gown, creeps downstairs.
A plate of bacon and eggs sits waiting for him at the kitchen table and the blonde woman, wearing one of Anna’s dresses, smiles at him as he approaches.
“Morning, darling,” she says.
It is Anna’s voice.
Arthur Kovic sits down at the table and stares at the woman as she bustles about, laying out a second and third plate of bacon and eggs.
Arthur looks down at the plate. The woman has assembled the bacon and the eggs to look like a face. The face appears to be frowning.
Arthur tentatively begins his breakfast. The bacon looks and tastes peculiar and the eggs are bitter and far too large. He wonders what animal laid them. He opens his mouth to say something, then pauses as the dark-haired girl, wearing his daughter’s nightdress, enters the kitchen, yawns and sits down at the table opposite him.
“Morning, Father,” she says, without looking at him and takes a long slurp from a glass of orange juice.
Arthur looks at the strange, brown haired girl for a long time.