Sometimes she had sudden flashes, like a vision, when she thought it would tear at her face, but it hadn't ever done anything except watch her.
She hated it.
It flexed its claws, plunging them into the sofa and then out again, pawing at it as it settled back down again. Its eyes watched her, and she felt cold. Some people said cats were like children. Her mother was a cat lover, but the black and white cat was not a child, not something to be loved. It was a watcher, a sentinel.
She threw a pillow at it but it didn't move. It had her measure, she knew, as it always had.
The television showed her husband caught up in some kind of crackling energy shell, suspended in the air about a metre from the ground. She squinted her eyes and wondered whether the energy was from one of his devices or from one of his adversaries'. Sometimes it was difficult to tell whether something was protecting a person or inhibiting them.
Several police officers jogged on to the scene and she realised that her husband was most likely captured. The police wouldn't dare get that close to him without knowing he was immobilised, and the pouty blonde super hero woman from Delaware was standing in front of him with her arms on her hips, jutting her impressive cleavage in his face.
Her husband seemed to be ranting behind the energy field.
For some reason the woman's mind made a deliberate turn, and she thought of a time during high school, so many years before. There was a boy back then, a boy she knew with crooked round glasses, a smattering of freckles and a fascination with European postage stamps. She couldn't remember his name but she thought it might have been Jewish. He had asked her to one of the dances but again she couldn't remember which one exactly. She was sixteen or seventeen, and already terrified of large crowds, so of course she had hidden from the boy for the rest of the semester and never gone to the dance. The woman could almost feel the thrum of the high school corridors again, the rising and falling sounds of teenager gossip. But then her vision cleared and she watched her husband being rolled into the back of an armoured police van, over and over in the energy shell, unable to stop himself from looking like a fool, a frustrated fool. She wondered what it would have been like being Mrs Postage Stamp instead of Mrs Kalamity King.
There would have been collector conventions, of course, and probably lectures from visiting experts. She would be expected to keep copious notes on origins and values and expected releases. Perhaps they would have travelled to Liechtenstein or Andorra or wherever it was that special stamps were printed. All in all the lifestyle of a stamp collector's wife certainly seemed quite adventurous and attractive.
The cat miaowed.
The television report switched to a series of inane advertisements and the woman sat and watched without blinking. Fiji travel packages, insurance, some sort of computer accessory and then coffee.
She stood up and walked to the kitchen where her two cups of coffee were still sitting: quietly keeping each other company. She stood there and looked out into the world again, but there was nothing new. The trees held the same green-yellow leaves with the same brown birds. The neighbour's dogs were still poking their wet black noses through the same pickets, and the road beyond was still empty.
It was nearly time to think about dinner, she thought suddenly.
Rubbing her hands down her dressing gown, she turned away from the window and moved to the freezer, already planning some kind of homely roast meal, with vegetables and maybe even some of the red wine they had been promising each other to open all year.
She'd make enough for the two of them, and maybe just keep his in the oven for when he got home.
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About the Author
Ben Langdon lives and works in Portland, Australia. As well as writing short fiction, he is working on a novel, growing three children and teaching at the local high school.
The Scoundrel’s Wife was shortlisted for the Chronos Award in 2011.
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