Marvell’s Vegetables

We bought fresh vegetables for our health and watched them rot in the fridge as our desire to cook faded with our love.

In Bonn, we ate lunch with a woman named Jelena. The similarities between her and Tracy were amazing. She was 40, recently single, spoke Russian and lived alone. She was a journalist, and wrote about how fucked up Russia was. I envied her wisdom and wished it for Tracy. But she was happy alone and I could not fault her for it. She loved an elusive artist; he appeared and disappeared weeks at a time, calling her at 4am, drunk and incoherent.

A man with Kim Jong Il sunglasses stares at me from across the restaurant. I pretend not to notice, but someone wherever I go, always stares like I am a burn victim. I feel outside of this culture, these people, my own marriage: watching it crumble while dividing our finances and making furniture lists.

During dinner, a moth flies into a glass of wine and begins to drown while my wife tries to convince me how we are better off separate. I start my stop watch. No matter how hard the moth struggles it is destined to die; the surface tension of the wine is too great and the acid will dissolve him even if he breaks free. After 9 minutes, 22 seconds, he has stopped struggling or has died.

Before we go to bed, she shows me a rash across her belly. We think it’s the stress, but it is an all-natural German body wash that is at fault. The morning after I agree to file our separation papers, the rash starts to clear.

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