Felix for a son, Anna for a girl. That’s what we’d decided. In happier times. Times when I would pack us a picnic but forget the forks so we’d eat potato salad with our fingers and lick them clean, and a small brown bird decided my wife’s hair would be perfect for nesting and darted at her head again and again no matter how my wife yelped and ducked or how I tried to shield her with a paper plate or how we fell about laughing at the seriousness of our upset in the face of such a foe. The bird finally triumphed and carried off the strand it had plucked to line its nest, and somewhere birds are singing that were hatched into my wife’s hair.

The pumpkin’s weight surprised me. I held it, and the blood flaked from its hard skin, and fell into the grass, into the dirt.

In happier times, before my wife had been my wife, when she was just Emelia, and we only suspected that we might love each other, and found ourselves more and more together on one couch or another, leaning against each other, and she traced a heart in the dust on my television screen, and when we lay in bed spent and naked she told me about her mother and her father and the time she went to Greece and stood before the Parthenon and thought it was a building she had walked by in some earlier life when it was young and painted bright colors and that night a boy in a dance club grabbed her breast and she punched him in the ear, I was jealous of whatever lives she’d had before we’d met, of any person who shared that time with her I could never touch. I still am.

I held the pumpkin to the sharp stubble on my cheek and I cried so that for a last time I would share fluids with my wife, and we would both touch the life she’d made, and I thought that here, with tough skin and woody stem, was a Felix in my arms.

 

 

My neighbors brought me pots of soup and pans of lasagna burnt black as asphalt around the edges, and when they saw Felix on my kitchen table they said, How good that you are getting into the spirit of the season. How good for you. I screamed at them and chased them from my house and threw their food into the garbage.