Home for Dinner

Work was only three blocks from home. Bardot was thankful for that every day, and especially today, when the entire contents of Heaven’s great big water-bucket had decided to dump itself over eastern Chicago. His umbrella was up—he was holding it with two hands—that was why it took him so long to answer his phone. He caught it on the seventh ring.

‘Hello?’

‘It happened again.’ There was static on the line—wind buzzing in the mouthpiece.

‘Hello—Reina are you alright?’

‘It happened.’ Her voice was shaking. ‘I went for a nap after lunch and I woke up and there was—’

‘It’s okay, it’s alright. Look, I’ll be home in a minute. We’ll have a nice meal, nice and warm and we’ll talk about this.’

‘Dinner’s almost ready.’

‘Good, good. Just stay right where you are. I’m almost home.’ Bardot turned up his coat collar and walked faster against the wind. Something sinister lingered in the back of his mind, like the brush of a ghostly hand, the whisper of a guttural voice. He couldn’t shake it. But Reina had been home for months now; there was no reason to worry, and certainly not to fear a repeat of the past. She’d had good treatment. And she had to have been expecting this, after the last seven.

Bardot stood in a puddle at the gate. The water seeped into his socks and they pressed cold against his skin. He took down his umbrella, shook it off and placed it by the door. Through the window—Reina was hunched over a large pot on the stove. Her clothes hung from her, but there was an elegance in her lines. Bardot admired the graceful curve of her neck, her slim and dainty fingers. There were a few flecks of blood on the outer corner of her wrist, a reminder of the day’s earlier events.

‘Reina, my love,’ he called as he opened the door.

As she turned, Bardot felt as though he was looking at one of those patterned optical illusions where, if you stood at just the right distance, with your eyes crossed and your head tilted, an image would bulge out at you from the abstract geometry. Her stomach billowed and swelled. He was about to ask her if perhaps she’d imagined the whole miscarriage, but then he blinked and her bump dissolved away.

‘I saw the most interesting thing on TV today,’ Reina began as she carried the steaming stew to the table. She brushed a kiss on his cheek on the way past. ‘After my nap, I was watching the discovery channel—this fascinating documentary about all the different species of animals that kill their own children. Did you know that male pipefish eat all their eggs if they find the mother ugly?’ She fixed Bardot with a calculating stare. ‘God forbid they have ugly pipefish children.’

She ladled meat and gravy and softened vegetables across his plateful of rice. The meat was tender and pink, very pink—almost bleeding in places. Reina had never been a good cook. It had only gotten worse since her time away. He forked a strip of what he assumed must be turkey, or quail, and eyed the juices reddening at its edges.

‘Sweets, are you sure this is cooked?’

‘It’s been on for hours,’ she said. There was something sly in the sudden smile that crept onto her face. Usually alluring, this time it unnerved him. It was a smile out of place in what should have been a sombre evening.

‘I’m sure it’s a survival of the fittest thing,’ Bardot added.

‘What?’

‘The pipefish.’ Bardot reached across the table and took his wife’s hand, which felt both warm and cold. He studied the little drops of blood on her wrist. ‘They’re making sure that only the most attractive, the strongest survive, that way they don’t waste their resources on the weaker offspring.’

‘I didn’t realise you knew so much about pipefish,’ she said, through a mouthful of meat. A trickle of pink saliva rolled down her chin.

‘What meat is this?’ he asked. The taste was salty, slightly bitter, but so tender.

‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s nice.’

‘There’s another interesting thing I learned today—the human foetus, at fifteen weeks, is just about the size of a quail.’