My wife is lording over crushed garlics and sorted bowls of cut and chopped in our small kitchen. She’s on break, so I’m on break. Not normally the house cook she takes the operation quite serious, with actual Indian cookbook and whole cardamom seeds too. She who never cooks actual meals, just rice and beans for herself and sad lunches she takes from home with apple slices, is monstering up a complex, by the book, meal for us of sinister Indian food. Just days after me feeling like death by Indian food poison. Of course there is no relation, so she sees no relation. Just likes the cookbook and used it before, years ago, when we held state in an outpost of typical midwest lack. How esoteric those dishes where in the context of our original marital hermitage. A single wide trailer on an acre break between farm, fields, and wood, with a creek slashing jagged across the northern property line. Warm Indian spice smells to thwart frost and snows and sharp winds that rattle old dirt road trailers at night and later on some of those actual winter nights, when clear night stars burn your cheeks for staring and creek frozen solid, both house cats and feral cats, some hiding in our chicken coupe or neighbor’s barn, or found an egress from brutal pure winter night, with snow on ground, through a crack in the flap-boards around our trailer, as if one cat they moan silent woe just before human ears hear the outside icy silence cracked in mad-dog laughter. Coyotes, a large, unhinged pack running the frozen creek crying maniacal threats and insulting yips, snapping jaws ready for movement. Probably in excitement nip each other only to ratchet up the whole diabolical madness of the scene. The scent of anything on four legs that night would end in dark stains in the snow and loose bits of fur to float up to the heaven of those chilling stars. But I’m tucked in my suburban home office in the mild terrain of Northwest winter, which is bleak and gray, but mellow and gay with the lights in windows in houses in rows upon rows, stacked up from the very edge of Puget Sound to the tickle-tip of Snoqualmie pass. I saw a lone coyote once, a half block from our house, slipping out of the shadows into full revelation of street lamps, calm as a fat dog off his chain. But there’s no fear in either of our old cats tonight. They knew those frozen nights and they were born of feral mamma and papa cats, and they know when they have it good in a house warm with a wife making a holy meal and even a good dog waiting on couch for the man in the den to come out for ear rubbing and a quick wrestle before washing quite human hands and sitting down to eat with the lady. They’ll wash dishes and he’ll smoke a pipe with new Xmas tobacco and he’ll puff clouds and dream with a full stomach and they’ll finish a game of Monopoly that had them haggling back and forth on the brink of everything until 4AM the night before.
    And at some point I’ll sicken myself knowing I’d also like to be drunk in a strange bar with wood floors or fucking the big fake tits of a Thai hooker, finishing quick and just laying in the dim light of the bedroom, catching my breath, coming back into my head and wondering in that moment of easy conversation, before the post fuck shower, about her past and her future and how I’d like to save her from all of God’s blessings.