The LifeExtend Technicians explained that my wife, Sarah, had murdered me. Buckshot had ripped holes through my lungs and heart, and it had taken almost three hours to get me sorted out.
Between those three dead hours and the ninety minutes spent back home, cleaning my blood and viscera out of every crevice in the kitchen, the whole night was practically gone. Sarah helped me scrub, but still.
And killing someone with LifeExtend coverage wasn’t a crime, though sometimes people got sued if they killed someone and caused them to miss a flight or a job interview or something. But still.
The last thing I remembered before waking up was scraping the inside of my ear with my pinkie—just really going at it.
I wasn’t sure if this was Sarah’s way of making a statement about our relationship, or if she was just grossed out by my ear scraping.
She was watching an episode of a murder show, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
All I could manage was, “Nice job getting the blood off the blinds. That looked really tedious. Remember, recycling is this week.”
It wasn’t always like this. When we first fell in love, we couldn’t be in the same room without touching each other. At parties, people asked us what we were laughing so hard about, and our answers never made sense to anyone but us.
We played a game where we tried to say the meanest insult to each other. People looked at us like we were terrible.
But then years went by. She memorized all my jokes. The little kid voice she sometimes did stopped being charming. At parties, we’d take advantage of being able to talk to anyone else. Most nights we watched TV in separate rooms.
We invested in a wider bed.
And I didn’t know how concerned I was supposed to be.
For retaliation, I rented a 9mm handgun from WhenceYouCame, and I shot Sarah in the back of the head while she was taking a shower.
From a cleanup angle, I felt this was so considerate that it bordered on romantic.
I hadn’t been sure exactly when I would kill her, but then I saw that she’d only pulled back the freshness seal on the hummus container instead of taking it all the way off.
Before I dropped her at LifeExtend, I had to feed her arms and legs into clothes. I realized this was the most attention I’d paid to her body in a long time.
I put a thick, plastic bag over her head to keep from spilling blood and gobs all over the house and car. The bag was from a seafood store, and it was thicker and sturdier than a regular grocery bag. I knew that I’d saved it for something.
On the way home, I picked up dinner from RavageMeDaddy Sandwiches.
Sarah stepped out of the ChauffHER rideshare car that she took home, and when she walked inside, I held up the RavageMeDaddy bag.
She said, “Uuuhhhhh, yesssss!” It was like we were back in college.
After we finished dinner, she stretched out on our short, little couch and fell asleep. I watched her breathe and twitch. Just a few hours earlier, I’d been figuring out the best way to secure a plastic bag, which still smelled like clams, around her neck.
I squeezed in next to her, on the couch that wasn’t long enough for me and wasn’t wide enough for us. She was doing that popping/clicking noise she sometimes did while she slept. I held off for as long as I could before giving her a little nudge so she’d turn over and cut it out.
Three days later, while I was eating chicken with my hands, she stabbed me ten or twelve times in the stomach, and as I bled out, she looked into my eyes and ran her fingertips along my eyebrows and down the bridge of my nose. Except for the excruciating pain and the terminal blood loss, it was a perfect moment.
When I got back home, the kitchen was spotless, and she must have seen my surprise.
“I bought a power washer yesterday,” she said, proud of herself.
Later that night, she came to the bedroom door.
“You’re the human equivalent of a gutter ball,” she said with a fake-serious look.
We were back to insult-flirting, and it made my heart pump hard.
“Your voice sounds like steady diarrhea,” I told her.
She climbed onto the bed with me.
Killing each other made the relationship feel new and unpredictable. She might tell me another boring work story about people I didn’t know. But she also might saw my neck open. This was what we’d been missing.
The next morning, we were alerted that our LifeExtend premium would be increasing, citing “abuse of resources.” The increase was about ten times what last year’s increase had been, when our bodies were downgraded from “Soft” to “Pre-Fat.”
“We should stop,” Sarah said.
This was the practical decision, but I could tell from her eyes that she wasn’t going to quit, and I didn’t consider it for even a second.
This was money well spent.
The next day, when I got home from work, the house was dark and quiet.
“Sarah?” I called. A floorboard creaked in the living room—maybe the bedroom. I crouched down low. I took little steps. I worried that the floor creak was part of her plan. I could be heading into a trap. I was almost sure that I was, actually. But I didn’t really mind. I kept inching forward, closer and closer, to my wife.
Banzelman Guret is a writer from Connecticut whose work has appeared in New Orleans Review and Potomac Review and is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review and South Carolina Review.