The Invisible Wife
an excerpt

A torrid tale of a disappearing woman tapped in her own life? A murder mystery? A love story? A sad tale of alien abduction and strangers in strange lands? No one knows for sure - we've only just begun.

Chapter One

Biting her lip. Chewing gum like a sordid cow. Chugging red wine, glass after glass. Walking obsessively around and around in an endless circle on the town's meadow. Sitting aimlessly in bars for hours on end. Spending valuable time in conversations that didn't matter. Ignoring the house cleaning. As she made her mental list of things she did too much of since quitting smoking a few months past, she realized smoking may have been clogging her lungs, but it had been keeping her sane and focused all these years.

She briefly wondered what to do about all of those acquired bad habits forming to replace her much loved oral fixation of 25 years, then abandoned the thought. Too depressing. Just as well, himself was home, and in a foul mood as usual from a day working in the bitter cold. He had taken to marching in and immediately glaring suspiciously at the thermostat, as if it couldn't possibly be warm enough in here, in spite of what the thermometer said. She kept her uncharitable thoughts about the weather and why he would move them to this frozen wasteland to herself, settling for "How was your day, dear?" instead.

She got a gruff "The usual." in reply as he stuck his head in the fridge and grabbed a beer. He turned to her and asked his standard question "Yawannagoout?" as he beheaded his Bud Light with one twist of the cap. Sensing the actual answer to her earlier question about his day would have been "bad", and knowing going out cheered him up, she grabbed her gear and headed for the door, knowing he would follow. She was always the designated driver, paranoid about drinking driving as she was.

As she walking in to the tavern, she allowed herself a brief hope that their usual seats at the bar were taken. Anything to shake things up a bit, even a different seat. Allowing her self a small smile at how easily she was amused lately, she thought to herself "We have lived in one place for too long. We've become encumbered and it's changed us in a million small ways." Deciding to avoid melodrama for the night, even in her thoughts, she settled in and immediately got sucked into a conversation.

"The Godfather III? Worst movie in the trilogy. That trilogy did not need a third movie. Two were fine. Three sucked." the bartender was saying.

"Hell yes, it sucked. That's what made it so great. It was artistically terrible." This from the bar know-it-all, Mike.

"No, no, no. Artistically terrible is Terror Firmer or a true B horror flick, not Godfather III!" the bartender, Glen, rejoined.

Tuning out the banter, she concentrated on avoiding eye contact with a particularly clingy patron and settled on a pair of fellow "fixtures", May and Dean. She liked May. She did her hair, and she was actually pretty good for this one horse town. Her husband was kind of simple, but good natured. Not a bad bone in his ever-stoned little body. She leaned over and started talking with May about nothing. Before long, the night was gone, she was home and looking at another evening of writing in her recliner while catching up on her DVR. Invisible days, invisible nights, continuous.