Monday, February 17, 2014

Window in the Wife by G. Arthur Brown (Random Title #16)

Before Ralph installed the window in his wife he found her quite hard to see through. Say, for instance, she stood in front of a beautiful flower arrangement. Ralph was unable to see that beautiful flower arrangement—before she had the window. Now, he could easily view all kinds of beautiful things through the pane of his wife.

She was quite quiet after the installation. She hadn’t been very talkative before, and replacing her head with a single panel of glass had just taken the wind out of her entirely. But she was good to look through, and he’d often call up his friends and have them come and look out of his wife at all the wonderful landscapes and creatures of God’s green earth. If his wife knew one thing, it was where to stand for the best tableaus.

It was dangerous to take her to public parks where children were tossing balls and running about carefree, so the couple went out less and less. But it did happen that, after a few short years, her pane did become cracked when an arrant Frisbee struck the wife on a beautiful summer day. And after that point, Ralph would always notice other men looking in at him through the window in the wife, their faces distorted by the broken sheet of glass. Their expressions, hard to discern.

One day he boarded up the wife, moved to another town and bought himself a new family, with a wife that was quite opaque and he found that, despite the lack of pretty views, his peace of mind was increased six fold. Though he did install a camera in the son, to live vicariously through the boy’s antics.

 

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