Things Start
How does it start?
With a bump and a thud, or maybe it’s a thud followed by a bump, not that the bump-thud order of things is truly important.
How it starts though, that is important. It’s everything.
One minute there isn’t a body stuck to the front grill of your car, and the next minute, there is.
Not that you notice this until you and your wife get home, leave your car, find blood splattered across the hood, and see the twisted body hanging there and not moving.
So, it sort of starts like that.
Though even that arguably isn’t how it starts. Maybe it starts when you first meet in college, so taken with her legs and ass that your heart skips a beat, your brain briefly enters a fugue state, and you find yourself wandering around campus wondering how and where you will run into her ass again.
Or, maybe it’s the first time you wake up next to her in bed, her naked body luminescent in the morning light. She is so still and her breaths are so minimal it’s like looking at a perfectly preserved corpse, something oddly erotic and discomfiting all at once.
Or, or, what about when she gave birth to your son? Maybe it started then, splayed out as she was, legs everywhere, fluids flying, first his head, and then his slippery, muck-covered body somehow emerging from the improbably small space before you, a moment so peculiarly menacing and surreal it’s more like magic than science.
It could have been any of that, or all of it. There are moments when some things start, and other things become something else, some of which are momentous, though ultimately having little to do with this, this thing that didn’t really start in any of those places, but is still somehow connected, because everything is connected, and that’s just how it works.
You are in the car with your wife, it is the storm of the century, and you are not thinking about her ass. Well, perhaps subconsciously, but at that moment generally speaking you are not thinking about her ass, falling in love, or the miracle that is birth. No, you’ve just had a fight, which is something people can do when not caught up in the miracles and moments of glorious oneness that is their life together.
So, how did it start?
Well, that was stupid. You weren’t being honest. Your wife received a text, the phone glowing and beeping and taking her away from where you had been, a conversation about your kids’ school, Thanksgiving, your new data plan, mostly stuff about nothing, or everything, it was what married people talk about endlessly, the regular stuff that allows you to get to the other stuff, the more important things that can sometimes be hard to address.
But then the text came in, and she smiled. That’s all, really, just a smile, but you knew it was that dude from the office, the guy she always calls her work husband, the young, single one, who has some weird sexual fluidity thing going on that allows him to sleep with men or women depending on his mood, something you find confusing and your wife finds fascinating.
You don’t think she’s fucking him, but she’s doing something, something she says you don’t understand, because you cannot accept that men and women can just be friends, and that she needs to have a male friend she can confide in who doesn’t look at her as an object to be undressed and conquered, just a woman in all her nonsexual womanness. And how can you argue with that? You can’t.
Plus, you know you are not a great listener, and maybe neither of you have been doing very much listening to each other for some time now, something you just didn’t recognize while you were in the middle of all that other stuff.
You could possibly say something about that listening thing right now as she sits there smiling and staring at her phone, because in this moment all that not talking you’ve not been doing seems so much more obvious to you, and you wonder if it does to her as well.
Actually addressing it though, here, now, finding the right words, that seems so hard, which you know is a backwards way to think about it, but you also know that’s it not going to happen, it can’t, won’t, and so instead you say, please don’t text while I’m driving in the rain, it’s distracting. She doesn’t listen to you, though. She doesn’t seem to hear you at all, so you reach for her cell phone and she turns away.
Now, should you be doing that while you are driving? You should not. Are you thinking about this? No, you aren’t doing much thinking at all apparently.
Should you pause here then, maybe catch your breath, remember that you are in the car and it’s raining, that you’ve been a really poor listener, that you still really love her ass (and everything else) despite what may or may not be going on with the dude, and that there has to be a better way?
Yes, you should pause, but you don’t, which is another way things start, not pausing, but it’s too late, you are enraged and you lunge for her phone, still driving, not looking, just lunging, and there is a bump and a thud, or a thud followed by a bump, and that’s how it starts, with a lunge, and a cell phone, a text, the storm of the century, and some fucking sexually fluid guy from work.
Neither of you acknowledge the thud, however, or the bump, much less the text, the rain, or any of it for the rest of the drive home. Neither of you even says a word. What can you say?
When you get home, though, you both silently walk to the front of the car to see if there is any damage, and there it is, a body, an actual body, stuck there, twisted and molded to the grill.
And you should definitely say something about this, right, yes, but what, what can someone say about this when they can’t even talk about all of the things they should actually be talking about? Not much. Not much at all.
So instead, you go get your shovel, and that’s how it really starts.
Ben Tanzer is an Emmy-award winning coach, creative strategist, podcaster, writer, teacher and social worker who has been helping nonprofits, publishers, authors, small business and career changers tell their stories for 20 plus years. He is the author of the newly re-released and refreshed short story collection UPSTATE and several award-winning books, including the science fiction novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space: A Father’s Journey There and Back Again and Be Cool – a memoir (sort of). He is also a lover of all things book, taco, Gin and street art.
