fiction

by Tom Ziemer

Where Is My Wife?

My neighbor’s house has a colossal bay window that arcs out over the cluster of junipers growing in front of his split level. All the houses on our street—hell, the grid of ten or so blocks that forms our neighborhood—look mostly the same, the beige and taupe siding blurring together so much that I sometimes drive right past our driveway on my way home from work. It’s hard to stand out around here, which is how the homeowners’ association seems to like it.

Yet this morning Scott—at least I think his name is Scott, since we’ve only met once during a groggy Saturday morning walk to the mailbox—has managed to make his home appear unlike any other in the vicinity. And beyond, for that matter. Because as I stand outside, trying to catch my breath in the humid morning air after digging out a thistle from our front lawn, my wife still asleep in our bed, I glance to the right and see Scott, coffee mug in hand, stark naked behind his bay window, gazing out to the east. Normally on a summer morning like this, the sun would blanket our side of the street, making it impossible to see inside. But it’s overcast today.

I’m too dumbfounded to look away—at least I think, I hope, that’s the cause of my momentary paralysis. Scott is a few inches taller than me, probably six-foot-two, with brown hair that gives off a slight reddish hue. He’s got some sort of tattoo on the right side of his chest, though I can’t make out the details from my vantage point. He’s not ripped by any means, but he’s not carrying much in the way of excess fat either, his undefined abs giving way to a surprisingly thick mane of pubic hair. His penis looks to be about the same size as mine, which I find brings me a sense of comfort before I scold myself for caring about such things at age forty-two. And for allowing my gaze to linger.

Enough, I tell myself, before forcing my eyes to retreat to the ground, where the thistle lies limply atop grass that I’ve spent the spring and early summer trying to revive after last year’s drought. When I can’t help myself and glance back up at Scott’s house, his living room is empty. I wipe the sweat from my brow, the rubbery smell of my gardening gloves activating the olfactory sensory neurons in my nose. My wife frequently makes fun of me for the gaping size of my nostrils, and I wonder if their physical expanse enhances my smelling ability. I try to picture Scott’s nose, to see how his nostrils compare, but I can’t seem to visualize anything other than his phallus and its bordering forest. Why do our dangling testicles appear so lifeless, like potatoes waiting to be cooked?

When I walk through the door from the garage after setting my trowel and gloves on the shelf at the rear of our two-car hangar, my wife is pouring herself a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter. She yawns, the skin around her eyes stretching to pull them open and force her into full consciousness. I can see the points of her nipples poking against the gray T-shirt she slept in, and my appreciation of their engorgement comforts me. Should I tell her about Scott? How would I word such a revelation? What would I say if she asked me how he looked? My brain churns, and evidently the confusion registers on my face, because she eyes me quizzically.

“Everything okay?” she says before succumbing to another wide yawn.

“Yeah, it’s . . .” I reply, “nothing.”

We’ve been debating whether we do, in fact, want to have a child, probing at a decision we thought we’d resolved a decade earlier. We’re both wary about future regret, of empty days and nights when we approach retirement and should be fussing over our descendant’s choice of college or career. We worry we’re not connected enough to our community, that school board elections don’t really pertain to us, that we have no reason to walk down to the high school and watch a game or a concert.

My wife eyes me for an extra beat, almost certainly while she decides whether to press me because I’ve never been a convincing liar. But instead, she grabs her coffee cup and walks over toward me, planting a kiss on my cheek and patting me on the back with her free hand.

We used to go to church on Sunday mornings, until we finally both admitted to each other that we didn’t know why. Old habits from childhood, misconceptions about the things adults should do.

Today, we’re planning on driving into the city to meander our way through the farmer’s market, once Carrie sufficiently wakes up and finishes her makeup regimen. This generally takes her about twenty-five minutes, a little more for a night out or if she’s nervous about meeting up with a catty friend.

I let her sip her coffee on the couch, book in hand, some novel about a woman detective who’s tracking a serial killer. She gets so absorbed in reading that I doubt she’d notice if I were to drop my shorts and wander around the house naked like Scott. I realize I don’t even know if Scott is married and rack my brain to conjure up any memories of women entering or leaving his house. I seem to remember a nondescript blond pulling into the driveway once.

My wife lets a fart slip, breaking my trance. I look over and she’s grinning at me, wafting her hand near her rear.

•

We wander the rows of market stands. My eyes spot a bundle of small yellow potatoes in a red mesh sack, right next to a basket full of green zucchini that have clearly gotten their fill of nutrients over the spring and early summer. I rattle my head to chase the thoughts of Scott, hopefully with enough subtlety to avoid alerting my wife. When I glance over, her head is turned to admire the bouquets of flowers at another booth, rudbeckia paired with snapdragons, surrounded by yarrow and celosia. While I’m the gardener in our household, I can’t help but think Carrie appreciates the beauty of flowers more than I do. I wonder what that says about me.

I look off toward the elevated highway that runs south of the parking lot that hosts the market, the only reason any of us venture into this neighborhood. Carrie taps my arm and hands me an iced coffee when I turn. She’s cute in her sunhat, which shades the pale, freckled skin that she routinely blames for her reticence to join in my yardwork.

There’s really no reason for us to come here; we have plenty of vegetables growing in our backyard garden, the results of my anal-retentive preparation in the late winter, a card table blocking a bookshelf in our spare bedroom/office, growing lights looming over red Solo cups full of dirt and seeds.

But it’s an outing, something we should do together as aging middle-class Millennials, something we do enjoy but possibly not as much as we let on to each other. We walk, hand in hand, each holding our plastic cups of caffeine in our free hands, a brown tote bag hanging from her elbow. A baby in a stroller coming from the opposite direction coos and grins at us, and we turn and smile at each other. I wonder if I know what she’s thinking and if she knows what I’m thinking. Maybe we’ll have sex when we get home. I look away but squeeze her hand.

•

The next day is Monday, stupid Monday with its unrelenting punctuality, and so I shower, make myself coffee for my travel cup, eat some yogurt with fruit and granola. I don’t pack a lunch, because until we undo all our careful planning with enough unprotected sex to germinate cells inside Carrie’s womb, I’m still a DINK. I’ll grab something from the cafeteria at work or one of the chain places nearby.

I’m backing my four-year-old hatchback down the slight incline of our driveway, turning the steering wheel to veer onto our street, when I look up and see Scott through his window. Naked, again, coffee mug in hand, again. I swear he looks right at me, maybe even nods his head slightly in greeting. My cheeks flush, and I hurriedly grip the gearshift and yank it into drive, overshooting and instead putting it into first, which I don’t bother to correct because I can do that after I turn off our street.

When I’m around the corner and safely out of his eyeshot, I pull over, shift into park and take a breath. Scott’s bare torso is burned into my mind, but this can’t be right. No one traipses around their house in the nude in full view of their neighbors. But I can’t drive back to confirm what I saw; if he’s there, it’ll just encourage him, show him that he’s succeeded in capturing my attention. Shit, he might even think I’m interested!

I close my eyes, bat away the image of Scott, open my eyes and stare right into the sun like a fool, as if I might burn away the neurons and synapses responsible for storing the image in my mind. I turn on the radio, something I rarely do because I prefer to silently plan out my workday, hit scan, let the dial make a full rotation while I sit there stupefied. I debate calling my wife, decide against waking her up; she works from home, which allows her to stay glued to our mattress for at least an hour longer than me on weekdays.

“Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads comes on, and I halt the scanning. The high-pitched shout-talking and funky rhythms jar my brain back into working order, and my sweaty palms take the steering wheel and guide me toward my office on the west side of the metro. I have no real friends at work, so I don’t need to debate confiding in anyone about Scott. Jesse is the closest, but we only complain about the CEO—another useless meeting where he showed us his vacation photos—or talk about baseball: Did you see they called up Vasquez? Sounds like Peterson might be on the trading block, think they need another bat? That sort of stuff. I’ve only heard Jesse reference his partner a couple times, and I was too timid to clarify the gender. He doesn’t seem gay to me, but Carrie teases me for not having an accurate gaydar.

It's a bland Monday, one where I can keep my head down and knock out enough reports to cover most of the week. So, I’ll hold half of them back, drip them out over the next few days at a nice steady pace to avoid my boss, the VP of data analytics, a guy a few years older than me named Rick, pulling me into any ad hoc projects. It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s just I’ve discovered over the years that these assignments don’t lead to any tangible personal gains.

The spreadsheets and dashboards distract my mind for most of the day, and I nearly forget about Scott until my lunchtime walk to refuel at a fast-casual Mexican joint. Something about the summer air pulls my mind back home, to the front yard, my blooming plants and Scott looming over them in the nude.

There’s got to be a reason for it, I tell myself. Is he coming on to me? I’ve taken up running again over the past couple months, even jogging shirtless to try to even out my annual farmer’s tan from gardening. What if it’s not even meant for me? But surely it couldn’t be for Betty, the middle-aged woman who lives across the street from Scott and resembles a plump, late spring robin in human form. I decide this is all too much, that I need to confess it to Carrie tonight after work. She’ll help me see the funny side of it, we’ll laugh and laugh, and then after enough time to chase any thoughts of naked Scott out of our minds, we’ll make love, maybe even skip the condom. It’s been a couple weeks since she got her IUD removed. Just so we feel like it’s on the table, she reasoned.

Relieved by having formulated a plan, I let an audible fart escape as I walk, then belatedly check to make sure no one is nearby. Two women are walking on the other side of the street, but they’re occupied in conversation and pumping their arms the way they do when it’s exercise rather than simply a means of transportation.

When I arrive home at the end of the workday, Carrie is sitting cross-legged on our faux leather couch, her laptop balanced on her splayed thighs, the ones I’m hoping to rub up against later. I wait for her to finish typing and look up at me before saying anything. I must have a look of fear or at least confusion on my face, because she frowns.

“What’s wrong? Did something happen at work?”

“No, it’s nothing big,” I say, although the weight this . . . problem? I don’t even know how to characterize it . . . occupies in my mind contradicts my words. “You know Scott next door?”

“Yeah,” she says. “He’s quiet, but he seems nice. He usually waves if I see him outside. What about him?”

“Has he ever been . . .” I pause, unsure how to say this, “naked?”

Carrie laughs. “What?!”

I fake a chuckle, to make this all seem humorous, to mask my inner disturbance.

“The last two mornings,” I say, “he’s been standing naked in his living room. Right in front of his window, sipping his coffee.”

“Yeah right,” Carrie says, bursting into another round of giggles. “Oh Craig, that’s demented, even for you. You almost had me there for a sec.”

I momentarily consider going along with this, pretending that I’ve attempted to pull off a silly prank on my wife by claiming that our “mild-mannered” neighbor is a nudist. But I can’t.

“I’m serious,” I say, my voice much sterner than intended. “I think he’s . . .” I start to trail off, then push through, “. . . targeting me.”

“So, you actually think that Scott is waltzing around in the nude and deliberately displaying himself for you?” she says. “Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”

“Does he?”

“I think so,” she says but seems to add a question mark to the end.

I feel foolish for having said any of this out loud, so I drop it, and Carrie surprisingly doesn’t seem captivated by my wild claim. We have a quiet dinner, grilled chicken and veggies, then head to the bedroom after one episode of a reality dating show. But she still wants me to wear a condom, and the image of naked Scott pops into my head for a full minute right in the middle of our romp.

After I’ve filled the condom, Carrie returns from peeing to guard against a UTI and twists my chest hair in her fingers, then rolls over and asks me to scratch her back. When I walk out to the kitchen to finish the dishes, I see Scott walking out to check his mailbox. He is fully clothed.

•

Then, as suddenly as Scott’s displays started, they stop, for a full month. Late July gives way to late August and the approaching onset of fall. Baseball season hits the stretch run, our local club falling out of contention and sapping my conversational fodder with Jesse at the office. Carrie and I keep putting off unprotected sex, or even broaching the topic. I suspect we’re both scared, though I’m struggling to parse out whether my fear is of having a baby or of voicing my desire for one, only to have my wife refute it. Fall feels like a time of new beginnings, which I suppose is a vestige of the school calendar. I find myself watching the kids on the sidewalk with a new level of attention during my commute. One morning I wave, perhaps a bit overexuberantly, at a family of four marching toward the park down the street, their boy flailing his legs on either side of one of those pedal-less kids' bikes, a curly-haired girl in a stroller. They eye me for an extra beat, presumably trying to determine if I’m a prior acquaintance. Or maybe they’re leery that I could be a pedophile.

Our tomato crop is worse than I’d hoped, and I fear I didn’t water them as vigorously during June and July, whether the prospect of seeing Scott consciously or unconsciously impacted my gardening regimen. One plant is slumped over its cage limply with just a few stubbornly green fruits sprouted from its vines. I turn the hose nozzle to the shower setting and douse my four raised beds, watching the miniature rainbow emerge when the mist meets the mid-morning sun. It’s Saturday, and Carrie is sleeping in after a night out with some of the girls from two jobs ago. When she returned, she was pleasantly buzzed, enough to get my hopes up. But she got sleepy while we watched an episode of “Love is Blind,” too much to even mock the swole male contestant whose proclamations about his sexual thirst animate our nights on the couch.

Satisfied with my watering, I yank off my gardening gloves and my shirt, swap my ratty old tennis shoes for the pair of Brooks running shoes that I bought to rejuvenate my jogging habit like the well-to-do, suburban white person I am. I set off at an intentionally slow pace, easing my legs into exertion, then pause at the park to stretch in earnest. My right hand grips one post of the monkey bars, which are surprisingly empty for a summer Saturday morning. In fact, the whole playground is barren, a delayed realization that hits me like a punch to the kidney. It feels impossibly wrong, like a warning sign of an impending extinction event. The urge to turn and sprint back home floods my brain. I could punch in the garage code, throw open the door, rouse Carrie awake, explain this new angle to her, how we need to copulate to repopulate our neighborhood playground.

I’m sweating, and not from the heat or the measly quarter mile I’ve got under my feet. The sound of my breath is the only thing I can hear, and the last thing I see before the world goes black is Scott walking toward me, smiling and naked apart from his shoes. They’re the kind with the individual toes that only true psychos wear.

•

When I wake, the first thing I hear is the beep of a bedside monitor. I crane my head to the left and see an IV bag that’s dripping fluids into my arm.

“How are you feeling, Mr. Thompson?” asks a nurse with an unimpressed look on her face.

“Where’s my wife?” I reply. I find some small satisfaction in volleying her question away with one of my own.

“She’s on her way,” says the nurse, whose badge reads ‘Jean.’ She seems like a Jean.

“What happened to me?” I ask, my throat catching uncharacteristically. I rarely cry in front of others, and only in socially acceptable settings like funerals.

“We’re still trying to figure that out,” Jean says, and I don’t like her tone and its implication that I’ve somehow concocted this situation to inconvenience her. “But we think you may have had a panic attack, based on the description your friend gave the paramedics.”

“Friend?” I stammer out.

“I don’t have any more information for you, Mr. Thompson,” Jean says in her Jean voice, with her Jean eyes looking through me, a damning sigh escaping her Jean mouth.

When she leaves the room, I close my eyes and try to do a body scan the way my therapist has taught me, starting from the tips of my toes and slowly moving up through my feet and legs. Carrie kept nudging me to see a shrink, said I could stand to bleed some pressure from my air valve, her way of gently telling me my uptightness was reaching unhealthily anal levels. Steven, in his green-painted corner office with the scent of chamomile puffing out of an air diffuser on his bookshelf, talked with me about generalized anxiety disorder. I’ve returned to see him twice a month since the late spring, mostly to appease Carrie.

But when my mental scanning reaches my groin, Scott wafts into my mind, blotting out my attempt at self-assessment and centering. His grin remains, even when I try to move onto my gut.

“Craig!”

I open my eyes to see Carrie rushing toward me, her hair pulled into a messy ponytail and her makeup-less face smelling faintly of her nightly zit cream.

“What happened, honey?”

“I went for a run, stopped to stretch, and . . .” I trail off. “I don’t know. But I saw Scott again.”

Her lips tighten and she stares at me with a look of what I think is pity that I instantly hate.

“Now he’s stalking you on your runs?” she says after a silence. “Let me guess, was he naked?”

“Yes!” I fire back. “As a matter of fact, he was! Why would I make this up, Carrie?!”

I’m shouting now, which draws a pair of nurses, neither of which is Jean, at least.

“Mr. Thompson, we need to keep your heart rate and blood pressure down,” says one of them, a thin man with a tattoo of a horse head that peeks out below the sleeve of his scrubs.

Carrie strokes my hair, which soothes me, but she’s still wearing that look of pity. I tell myself to let it go for now, to accept that I sound like a lunatic with my allegations. Even though I know I’m not insane, that I’m not hallucinating anything. Scott is a nudist. And maybe a stalker, too.

•

We drive home after I’m discharged, and I fall soundly asleep in our bed. I dream of walking hand in hand with a very pregnant Carrie. We walk on and on, down a sidewalk that seems to stretch forever, straight ahead, without even the slightest deviation. Carrie turns to me, tells me we’re almost there, not to worry, then reaches up and slaps me across the face.

“Craig.”

She’s stooped over me, looking newly worried, when I blink open my eyes and shake my head.

“You were making noises in your sleep,” she says. “You sounded like you were in pain.”

“I’m . . .” I sputter, before taking a deep breath. “I’m okay. Just had a strange dream.”

She stares at me for a few seconds, then brushes my leg through the comforter while walking toward our bedroom door.

“Oh,” she says, turning back to me. “While you were asleep, Scott dropped off a meal for us. He said he saw the ambulance this morning and wanted to check to see if we were OK.”

“You see, I wasn’t lying!” I say, impressively enraged for someone who was sleeping just minutes ago. “He did follow me on my run!”

“Craig, calm down,” Carrie says, putting her hand on my shoulder. “The park is just down the street. I’m sure he just saw the ambulance go by and wandered down to see what was going on.”

She doesn’t believe me. A feeling of powerlessness hits me like her dream slap, a clear realization that I cannot make her believe me, and I wonder if it’s the same reluctance that keeps telling her to ask me to wear a condom. And so I just shut my mouth and don’t press the issue. I’ll have to show her that I’m telling the truth, that I’m a worthy father, that we could be happy standing at that playground, bumping into each other while tracing our child’s progress around the jungle gym.

•

We eat Scott’s donated chicken Caesar salad at our bar-height table for two, a piece we’ll need to sell or repurpose if we do ever spawn a child. Carrie has bags under her eyes; she looks like she’s the one who was rushed to the hospital and rehydrated. I feel the urge to apologize for the stress I’ve put her through but stop myself because I haven’t asked for any of this. Aren’t I the victim here? And why exactly am I eating this asshole’s food? This is probably part of his masterplan; I bet he’s watching us through the backyard. I look out our sliding glass door, but the maple tree’s foliage is too thick for me to spy anything over the fence.

“What are you looking at?” Carrie asks.

“Nothing,” I reply. It’s not worth rehashing this conflict.

“I’m actually not that hungry,” I add, standing and carrying my bowl, part of the oval set we bought from Pottery Barn for salads and soups. Carrie cocks her eyebrow slightly but doesn’t press me. We’ve reached the part of our dance where we don’t bother to challenge each other.

I shuffle back to our bed and try to force myself to sleep, as if I can close my eyes tight enough to cold reboot my brain. Maybe I am losing my mind. How would I know if I was? Would a warning sign display? Caution: You are currently hallucinating. The images you see may not represent reality.

I debate calling my brother and talking through the whole situation, but I don’t think I have it in me to explain everything. Plus, he’s still pissed at me for missing my nephew’s birthday party. I couldn’t find the words to articulate exactly why it was difficult for me to be around a gaggle of children, how I envy pieces of the chaotic life he bemoans when we gather at our parents’ place. It felt indefensible, so I just sent a card with some money tucked inside.

I manage to doze off, then wake to the sound of another neighbor’s beagle howling. I check my phone, see that it’s 12:31 a.m., and Carrie still hasn’t come to bed. Even for her, that’s late for a Sunday evening, so I get up and walk quietly out to the living room to search for her. Maybe we can forget this saga, silently hold each other, let things progress from there. I feel the blood flow into my groin and try my best to stifle it, because I know I shouldn’t obsess over sex as the only form of intimacy.

It's dark in our house apart from the light above the kitchen sink, which means Carrie is still awake somewhere. I walk down the hall to her office, which is dark and empty, then open the door to the basement, in case she’s doing a midnight yoga session to relax before bed. But all the lights are off down there, too. Her Toyota Corolla is in the garage, so I step out the front door, making sure to unlock it behind me so I don’t trap myself into spending the night on the front stoop. Without really thinking, I begin walking across the yard toward Scott’s house. Because of course that’s where she’d be, of course this is all connected.

His front door is open behind the glass entry door, which is strange for this time of night. Then again, a person who stands naked in front of his living-room window likely doesn’t have many inhibitions. I stop on the path in front of the single concrete step leading up to the entryway; from this vantage point, I can see directly into the dining area adjoining the kitchen. There, at a large oval table, sits Carrie, crying. Scott, clothed in checkered pajama pants and a gray T-shirt, rests his hand on top of my wife’s, while a blond woman who appears to be our age rubs her back.

My stomach tightens and my jaw clenches, because I don’t like to see her in this state but also because I should be the one comforting her, not these strangers, especially that maniac. Only then does it dawn on me that I’m branding Scott, this man who is visibly aiding my wife, a maniac while I stand outside his home in only my boxers. I watch, frozen, as Carrie tearfully nods her head, wipes her eyes with the back of her right hand.

Rather than sink to my knees, though, I turn and trudge back across the yard to our house, shutting and locking the front door behind me. I pause as an idea takes hold in my still-sleepy brain, smiling despite the discomfort welling up in my stomach and chest. I open the door, don’t bother to unlock it this time, and step back outside. I walk back across the lawn, toward where I dug up that pesky thistle months ago. I bend and pull down my boxers, stepping out of them. Two can play this game.

Then I shout his name.

---

Tom Ziemer is a writer who lives in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin (the self-proclaimed Troll Capital of the World) with his wife, Hannah, two sons, and two dogs. He is a former sportswriter for The Wisconsin State Journal and Wisconsin Soccer Central. His work has appeared in 101 Words, BULL, Johnny America, Revolution John, ScribesMICRO, and The Good Life Review. Find him on Bluesky @thommyziemer.bsky.social.