It just so happened I was tired of being a physical creature. I wanted to get the upper hand before my body had a chance to inflict more damage upon me. To put it bluntly, three children were extinguished in my womb over the course of five years and I wanted to shed my rogue body and its treacherous movements and waning power. I never wanted to look in the mirror and blanch at my hollow stomach and eyes again. Luckily, I had an experimental scientist and adjunct physics professor for a father, who could be of use in this tricky situation. I found him in the driveway of his rented apartment, kicking the trunk of his failing car.
“Maybe I can help,” I said.
Papa planted his hands on his hips. “And what would my darling like in exchange?”
I took a step toward him. “I do not want to have a body,” I said.
He sighed profoundly. “You may not be a product of the first freshness, but you are too young to crave oblivion.”
“I don’t want to die. I only want to shed my physical self,” I clarified. Papa was still skeptical, but I knew I could change his mind. He had seen me clutch my stomach and rip out my hair and weep due to my physical disappointments. He knew how much it hurt me, to carry around my heavy bones and wicked womb. As he gazed sorrowfully into my eyes, I unfurled my plan for sweetening the deal. “If you make it happen, I won’t need my car any longer,” I said, practically singing the words. I got the car because I thought driving around town would help me escape, but all it got me was a few parking tickets.
Papa tilted his head, still mournful but intrigued by my proposition. “You have consulted your husband?”
“Of course,” I lied.
My father sighed and regarded the heavens. He had reasons to be reluctant. After all, his track record was questionable at best. Ages ago, Papa’s love potion made my ex fall in love with my cat instead of me. Imagine my surprise when I woke up in the middle of the night to find my beloved at the foot of my bed, caressing poor Mr. Snuggles as he whispered, “There is no remedy for love but to love more…” Most recently, I asked him to bring Mama back from the dead; she returned to us as a cranky, flatulent baby and we didn’t know what to do with her until she was adopted by a happy couple from Poughkeepsie. In spite of these troubling outcomes, I was desperate for supernatural aid.
“You may regret this, foolish one,” he said. “I certainly will.”
Papa knew his daughter was a stubborn creature; he preferred to aid in my destruction rather than leave me to my own devices. And so, he disappeared to his basement laboratory. I put a hand on my stomach and gazed at the overgrown grass in my father’s rented yard. After a while, he returned with a bottle of green lotion. He sprinkled a few ladybug wings and a slice of summer squash into the mix and shook it up. He told me to rub the lotion all over my body and contemplate the pain it brought me and soon it would all be gone.
“You must be certain,” he said. “There will be no going back to how things are.”
“And good riddance,” I said, making him wince.
I ran home as fast as my aching legs could take me, and then I slathered on the lotion and thought of the physical indignities I had faced. First, there was being born, then passing gas, then hunger, then teething, and, skipping ahead some years, there was menstruation and hangovers, and being attracted to men who were not my husband and so on, but my body’s latest series of disappointments was so awful I could not bear to think of them, and yet I did, three separate half-formed children rushing from my nether regions like bloody waterfalls, hot and furious, taking with them my final shreds of faith. I rubbed every last drop of the lotion all over myself, hesitating only slightly when I covered my erogenous zones.
I was becoming a touch translucent by the time my husband came home, dropping a sack of ungraded composition essays on his feet.
“First you buy those hideous curtains. Then the new car that we never use. And now this,” he said.
He was laughing because he did not understand my condition was permanent. It dawned on him slowly. He knew I had been suffering, but he still believed in our future as parents and did not fathom the depth of my pain or know that I had given up, three strikes and I was out. Well, what could he do? He put a record on, opened our only nice bottle of wine, and we stormed the porch. The wine was pure ecstasy, an explosion of cherries and earth. The evening light was wondrous. But when I sipped my second glass, the wine flowed through me, all over my chair. My husband lowered his head in his hands.
“Look, I know it happened to your body, but it hurt me too. I just wish you’d let me know that you ran out of hope.”
“But I am letting you know,” I told him, and he sighed in exasperation.
“Why couldn’t you just tough it out like the rest of us?” he said.
He stalked out into the darkness and I let him be. I stood before the bathroom mirror, watching my body fading until it contracted into an orb of light, a sun the size of a baby’s fist. This fine glow would never let me down. I was flawless, the pinnacle of efficiency and splendor. I could move quickly too, did I mention that? I could float, and flit, and flutter about. It was far better than driving my new car down the open roads, trying to forget myself as the wind flitted through my hair. I was beauty and perfection.
My husband begged to differ. When he returned, I found I could communicate telepathically, and I tried to convince him our marriage would only improve with our new arrangement. I pointed out that he could, for example, revert to the old curtains. I would no longer steal the covers at night, or hog the bathroom, or wake him when he snored. Furthermore, we would save money on clothes and groceries, not to mention health insurance. Looking to the future, he would save thousands on my burial costs, did he know how much coffins alone were going for these days? It was simply outrageous.
When this did not take, I added, “I thought you married me for my mind.”
“I’m not so fond of your mind right now, either,” he said.
Then he lumbered up the stairs. I followed him to bed, but I recalled that I was a transcendent orb that did not need sleep for fuel like some base human creature, so I explored the woods behind our house all night long, hovering above the ground and then levitating to the leafy treetops and their dark, lush beauty—and, when I grew bored with that, I zipped right up to the heavens and bounded around the fiery planets and glowing stars and their endless imperturbability. When I floated back in the morning, I found that my husband had pulled out a chair for me at the breakfast table, and in that manner our marriage resumed.
Things were great for a while. In fact, they were better than ever. Every evening my husband and I sat on the porch comparing his composition students to my woodland creatures. He drank wine and sprinkled it in my direction and I said I could taste it, though I couldn’t and no longer needed alcohol for transcendence. I could transcend anything I wanted now, quite literally, and spent most of my time orbiting the dark, lonely moons, as well as the bright stars that were set like diamonds in the velvet of the all-knowing night.
Sometimes Papa would join us for dinner. Though he was wistful when he gazed in my direction, he did not berate me for what I had done.
“Your car runs like a dream,” he told me, and I was pleased he could go anywhere he wanted and did not gloat about how much better my peregrinations were without a car weighing me down. My husband resented my father for transforming me, but he did not tell him to leave. He was pleased to have company. We lived far from the university and had few friends.
One day, though, I was the one he asked to leave. We were having dinner. Or rather, my betrothed was devouring a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, one of my favorite meals, taking his time with the rich saucy dish just to tease me, no doubt.
“I can’t take this anymore,” he said. “I did not marry a ball of light.”
“But we’ve been getting along splendidly. I don’t feel pain any longer. Plus, you have already saved a small fortune on wine,” I tried. When he put down his fork and glared, I added, “Don’t you want me to be happy?”
His jaw hardened. “I have needs, Yulia.”
“You are a base, physical creature.”
“I never denied it.”
“You could always join me,” I said, desperately, though if I thought there was any chance he would join me, I would have asked him to begin with. He lowered his head into his hands but I stubbornly pressed on: “I can talk to Papa.”
“Don’t be a fool.”
“Just the other day, you said you’d rather die than grade another composition essay,” I reminded him gently, but this failed to win him over.
He returned to his meaty repast, and for a moment I wanted to have a bite, in spite of the digestive problems and guilt I would have felt after eating it as my former physical self. I orbited around him and could have sworn his hair stood up from the electricity I generated. I was stunned by the sight of his rogue strands of golden hair in the dusk light.
“You are beautiful,” I told him.
“So were you,” he said, wiping sauce from his chin.
I floated off after that. But I could not help myself. I was no longer thrilled by the breathlessness of the heavens, and wanted to float closer to earth. More specifically, I floated near the treetops by my former home, so I could keep track of my husband, and it did not take long to yield results. When a low, vulgar-looking woman arrived at his door, I did not hate her. I only felt sorry for her, for the weary flesh under her eyes and how her legs must have ached in her high, high heels.
After that, I hung out at Papa’s. I watched him dine and fumble with his basement machines and heard stories of his Kyiv childhood and entertained him with tales of my nocturnal expeditions, most of which kept me closer to the earth now, grazing icy mountains and traversing over the blue, beguiling ocean, and the deserts with their hunched, resigned camels, and the heavy, low-flying clouds. Sometimes, I even floated above Papa’s bequeathed car when he drove down the long gravel roads outside of town, singing Soviet ballads and thinking of Mama, and I thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad escape after all, pressing the gas with abandon as you felt your wheels shuddering over stones on a dark lonely night.
But after a while, I knew it was time to leave Papa. I could see how much it hurt him that he could not stroke my hair. One day, his eyes glazed over when I was raving about how I joined a flock of birds in migration, upsetting their purposeful geometry, and I told him I understood.
“I wish you could accept the natural state of things,” he said, turning to the window.
“The natural state is short and degrading.”
“Indeed,” he said, watching two squirrels chasing each other around the base of a tree. “But it has its moments, little one.”
I flew far, far away without looking back. I began spending most of my time near the ground. I raced with wild horses and antelope and slowed down to observe shameless necking teenagers and gorgeous bird mothers tending to their flocks and, on one occasion, a fisherman who sang the most beautiful song in a language I did not recognize in the early dawn. I did not think of my desperate husband rutting on his high-heeled whore or my widowed father fussing over lab equipment that would never salve his pain.
I only returned years later, when I sensed that Papa was fading. I was just in time for his funeral and was not sad I did not get to say goodbye, because I knew seeing my glowing aura would only bring him pain. I did attend the funeral, where two Soviet cousins and a handful of graduate students spoke of my father’s hard work in spite of a lack of results.
Only as I floated off did I see my husband in the distance, crouching behind a mausoleum with a bouquet in his hands. His hair was thinned and gray, but his mouth was as crisp and lovely as it was when he kissed me on our wedding day. He did not see me, which was for the best. He crept off toward his getaway car, which was driven by the same vulgar woman from before, who was a dignified redhead now. And in the back of the car there were two somber teenagers who had my husband’s eyes.
Papa was right. There was a natural order of things, and by the time I reached what was supposed to be old age, I did crave oblivion. I craved it hard. It had been years since I had roamed the galaxies or grazed the treetops, learning that ecstasy had its limits. My floatations had been limited to the ground for years. I raced graceful deer and breathless gazelles and brushed over wildflower fields, trying to delight in the earth’s flora and fauna. I wondered if I would have felt better if I could touch those living creatures, if I could feel the earth crunching beneath my feet like Papa felt the gravel below his car. But Papa was dead and there was no way I could revert to being a person. I did not know how my non-life would ever end.
I took to the galaxies once more. I flew into space for weeks at a time, hoping the thinning air would do me in, but it had no effect. I flew all the way to the moon, but it did not chill me, and then I recalled the ancient warning about flying too close to the sun, and I did just that, I tried to melt into the hot ball of fire, but it turned out that was a lie. When I floated down to earth, I must admit that for a second, our unruly planet with all its imperfections held a certain beauty and logic.
Logic would tell me that fire could be quenched, like the children in my womb, so I tried soaking in the ocean I had grazed for so long. I went down to the bottom of the sea, to barnacles and shipwrecks and coral reefs and electric fish, so luminous and unloving, but it did not drown me. The lakes did nothing for me either, though I did encounter droves of bug-eyed snails who beheld me with wonder. The light I cast on the bottom of the lakes was a glory. But nothing would do me in.
Around this time, I sensed that my husband was expiring. As I floated toward home, I had conflicted feelings. I did not want to be a nuisance, to complicate his passage to the abyss. But even my lack of humanity had its limits. My darling was in the hospital and I had to see him. I tried not to linger as I passed our former home to the place where my husband was convalescing.
I floated in the room slowly. There he was, my beloved in bed, in the most degrading state, hardly the size of a child, collarbones protruding, eyes retreating, the mouth I had loved creased with folds, his head as smooth as my surface.
Beside him sat the same wife in her dotage, white-haired with a tipped-down head, and two children not much younger than I had been when we parted. How I pitied them! These sad, saggy humans watching their patriarch dissolve into the ether while knowing that they were all destined to meet the same fate. I must have been thinking aloud, because his eyes popped open as I hovered over his horned feet.
He reached toward me and said, “I hope you’re happy after all.”
My non-heart purred; he remembered our last conversation after all these years. Was I happy? Would I have traded my worldly adventures to be decaying beside him, holding his hand? I was at a loss for words. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in years. I hovered closer, brushing against his cracked lips. His wife whispered to their children, saying they should go tell the nurses their father was hallucinating.
“I wish I had tasted that spaghetti,” I told him, and he laughed softly.
He was still the man I loved, after all. I wanted to rest beside him for eternity. As he fell into slumber, snoring gently with his mouth open, I knew what to do. I floated between his lips. I slipped past his tongue and squeezed down his throat and pushed and pushed through slime and gastric juice until I was inside his warm and primordial stomach.
It would not take much longer for him to die, I knew. There was nowhere else I wanted to go, so I stopped my manic movements and listened to the faint beating of his heart. I waited for my beloved’s body to shut down and prayed I would be smothered, just like our non-children had been, snuffed out within the blameless body of someone who loved them. The darkness and quiet embraced me and filled me with warmth and something resembling hope. I was perfectly still and certain that if this did not kill me, nothing would.
Maria Kuznetsova is the author of the novels Oksana, Behave! and Something Unbelievable. An assistant professor at Auburn University, she lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband and two children.
