The Professor’s Wife (Flash Fiction Part 8)

This is the 8th part of the story. The previous parts are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Alotus waits until the dinner is over and the table is cleared. Her mother-in-law starts to watch a K-drama in the living room, and the two children go upstairs. Alotus steps into the small home office, where her husband Daneu spends most of his evenings. For a minute, Alotus feels sorry for her husband. He is a very simple person and a very good person too. Alotus can’t understand how a simple good person like him becomes a bad husband to her. She doesn’t understand how this happens. Is she too demanding? Of course not. Is she a bad woman? Of course not. The problem is that math is his life and he doesn’t have any other interests. He eats, sleeps, and does math. That’s it. That is sufficient to make him a happy man. He is definitely not choosing a life path that can make himself happy. He burdens himself with a wife, a mother, and two children, towards whom he pays very little attention. Children bore him to death and he tries to avoid being with them as much as he can. If his mother is bored staying home for too long, it is Alotus who drives her to parks or events or street fairs. If his mother wants to see a doctor, it is Alotus who drives her and interprets her symptoms to doctors in English. Daneu loves his mother very much, but it is a silent love, and between the two, there are rarely any conversations. And it is a love that doesn’t include chauffeuring, talking, enjoying each other’s company, or understanding each other’s opinions.

Daneu is poring over his math paper and Alotus interrupts him. She tells him what the insurance agent Alu told her and asks him why he changed the beneficiaries without telling her. Daneu sighs–he often sighs these days whenever he can’t avoid talking with her–and says he forgot to tell her. He didn’t want to disappoint his mother who asked him to leave a bit of money for his brother back home. The brother is not doing well financially. Actually only half of the insurance payout–it is a permanent insurance and it will eventually pay out– will go to his brother, the other half is still hers. He hopes that she will be generous enough to let his brother have it.

Alotus is furious. She was trained to be a good and silent girl, which means she has never learned how to talk about an upsetting topic without losing her cool, or how to argue a point well while not letting the surge of emotion to disrupt her speech. Anyway, Alotus only knows how to be silent and how to scream, but nothing in between.

She ends up screaming at Daneu, claiming that he has always treated her unfairly, treated her as a cook and a maid who is not worthy of sharing information with. After treating her as a slave, he exercises his usual deception of transforming the issue –“it is a question of her generosity and she is the problem while he is always generous and is never the problem.” Actually she thinks he is insulting the word “generous”–being generous means she has to tolerate his perpetual belittling and disregard of her.

He says he can’t believe that she is so upset over such a tiny issue. To be fair, she can change the beneficiaries to her permanent policy to her own brother or sister. He would have no problem with that.

“You are missing the point. Your not discussing with me is the most enfuriating. You just think you can make decisions for both of us. Also women live much longer than men. It is most likely that I can benefit from your insurance when I get old. And the reason you don’t care about my policy is that most likely you will die before me and you can’t benefit from my policy.” Alotus says.

Their discussion goes on but no conclusion comes out of it. Alotus asks Daneu to change the beneficiary back, but he refuses; Daneu accuses Alotus of being dramatic and holding an issue as small as a needle as if it is a hammer. Eventually Alotus’ voice goes hoarse and she has to quit the home office. She comes back to the living room. Her mother-in-law has already gone to her room, and Alotus is alone in the living room. She flips the channel but can’t find anything interesting on TV.

She hears the sound of Daneu’s footsteps, coming from the home office and going down to the basement. She wonders what he is doing. If he goes down, it is definitely not for the purpose of helping her clean up. Then she remembers that Danue asked her where the tennis rackets were. He said he needed to have more exercises and he was thinking of taking their kids to play tennis this coming weekend. Taking the kids to the park and talking to them about math or helping them with their math homework–these are the only two things he is willing to do for their kids. Everything else is none of his business in his opinion. Alotus had stored the tennis rackets in the basement. In the past, she would have gone to the basement to fetch the rackets immediately, but not anymore. She just told him to look for the rackets in the basement.

So Daneu goes down to the basement and after a while, his footsteps come up. He stops at the door of the basement. She imagines him standing on the narrow stairs one or two steps lower than the door and tries to open it. However the basement door is stuck. She has asked him to get it fixed for a long time. Just take the door down, shave the edge off a little with a hand planer, and put it back again. However he has not been willing to do it. He has asked her to hire somebody, but she thinks this is too small a job to hire somebody. Other people’s husbands are so much more handy than Daneu.

Now standing at the top of the basement stairs behind the door, he calls her name, “can you come to push the door open? It is stuck.”

“It is stuck because you are not willing to fix it.” Alotus says loudly and gets up to go to the basement door. She is still angry with him. The basement door opens into the basement stairs. So she pushes it forward with all her strength and the door opens with such a force that it hits Daneu, who’s standing behind. Daneu is probably not paying attention or probably is not standing very steady on the narrow stairs. When the door hit him, he falls down the stairs. He screams.

Alotus runs down the stairs as quickly as possible. Daneu lies there. He’s dead. Two tennis rackets lie next to him as well as a broken two-foot long ceramic vase. Alotus likes to keep the vase in the basement in case children run into it and break it and cut themselves in the process, but Daneu likes to bring it to the living room from time to time.

“It’s all your fault.” Alotus yells, “you never listen to me. You never fix the basement door and you always want to show off your vase. Now you suffer the consequence.”

(To Be Continued Here)

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Image by bridgesward from Pixabay