He transgressed. She transgressed. They transgressed. But this was just conjugation, nothing real, words swagged over tie-backs. In actuality, they were on the train, traveling south from the city to the house in the country. Her parents owned it, had owned it for as long as he had known her. He had visited once a year, in summer, ate food that was provided him, drunk wine he never paid for, smiled like a son-in-law. Each year his dreams grew wilder and his temperament more timid. He kept a book of all the things he had not been able to do and knew that she did, too. She looked across the aisle at him the way a person looked at a problem. The station at the end of the line, the station nearest the house in the country, was small and pristine, a monument to tasteful money. He would step off the train, smile, hug his in-laws, hate every second that was taken from him vampirically by these kind old people who had made his wife, made her the woman she was, made her the kind of woman who found her way to a man like him, turned his head, taught him to like—to depend upon—his own rewarded helplessness. The train shot south. Every tie it crossed, perpendicular to its path, was a momentary mockery.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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