Not a Breath

Wallace swallowed a bland, oversized bite of boiled chicken breast, and the air snapped off. He was choking. He tried to wash it down with the tumbler of vodka he’d allowed himself for lunch, but it merely spilled in a river over his cheeks. Nothing tasted like much of anything these days after the doctor’s high-blood-pressure diagnosis, and so it was wheat bread with boiled chicken and careful measures of low-calorie booze. The diet of staving off death might now kill him.

But Wallace was a big man, still strong after thirty-seven years working construction. His trachea could muscle out the lodged chunk, perhaps, and he willed it, flexed his neck, strained. Still the clog inside him persisted. He was sixty-two but balled with muscles under some insulating layers of fat, just like the old houses he demolished at work—strong bones under rotting, mossy facades.

His strong hands grappled with his neck, strangling up that piece-of-nothing chicken refusing to let him breathe. Still no give. If his grip couldn’t finish the job, his fist could. He’d punched his way out of a few conundrums in the past. Not a few; he knew how many. He’d punched seven, knocked down four of those in the first punch and ended the squabbles there. His old scavenging partner Darren had taken the most swings against him, had broken one of Wallace’s ribs, but he, too, eventually went down. Even though he’d loved Darren like a brother, his huffing habit had fucked up their side hustle way worse than Wallace’s drinking.

Wallace imagined Darren and punched at his own chest, thumped and throttled, until he stumbled back and clanged into his wedding picture. That frame crashed to the hardwoods, shattered. In the picture, they were kissing in front of a wild flower field, a giant moon behind them. Full moons were like medicine for her, and they’d married under one. Katie had been a hippie, quit various jobs every month, fed a hoard of stray cats and deer, and he’d loved her until that stopped.

Wallace wobbled. Still couldn’t sneak breath. The lack of oxygen or maybe the pre-lunch tumbler of vodka dizzied him. How many seconds had it been? How long could a person go without breathing? Without Katie?

The puppy came running. She mistook the clamoring for a chance to play. She loped toward his legs, dropped a rope knot onto his lap, panted expectantly. He tried to shoo her away, and she jumped onto him, excited by the game. She bullied the slobbery knot against his arm. Wallace reached for it, and the dog tugged enough for him to get to his knees. The puppy was a rescue, about a year old, some kind of shepherd mix, sandy hair like Katie’s, so he’d named it Katie, which his kids found weird, but he didn’t care what they thought.

His goddamn kids. He pulled his phone from his pocket and stabbed until he’d started a FaceTime call with his son August, the first one to come up in his recent calls, even though they talked the least, but they’d had a rare chat Sunday about mostly nothing, avoiding politics, memories about Katie. Even August’s job as a math teacher had become too controversial since COVID years, all those vaccinations and masks, which Wallace found ridiculous for kids, though August abided every rule like gospel. Jesus would wear a mask, August had once told him. And Wallace couldn’t understand why anyone on any side of any issue would speculate about what Jesus would do. Jesus was made up—what could be more ridiculous than a superhero carpenter? Though, as the FaceTime rang and Katie the puppy licked his cheek and Wallace’s body grew heavy as a ton of scrap steel—he considered revising his stance on Jesus.

The call ended itself. No answer, he thought at first, but when he stabbed at his phone to call another one of his thankless, self-righteous kids, nothing happened. The phone stayed black. He rarely remembered to charge the thing, even though he’d gotten rid of the landline, to save money, and because his kids made fun of him for being so old to still have one, and because his kids never called him, nor any of the guys from work, nor anyone but telemarketers. Sometimes he’d string them along, just to hear a voice, just to have a reason to use his. So when he cut the landline, he’d adopted the puppy and relied on the dumb smart phone, which was always dying because he let podcasts play to air out the silence. He didn’t care much about the subject. It was like the chaos of conversations on a construction site. You never knew what you might learn about a man, about the peculiar topics that might carry your interest through a work shift. But those podcasts—so many were about murders. Why were people so obsessed with murders? What about good, normal people? He’d been good enough. Not great, but an okay father, a hard worker, and he’d loved the hell out of Katie, the way she had to go outside for every full moon, the way she dragged him along, the way they didn’t need to talk, just breathe.

He couldn’t stand, but the door wasn’t all that far. He’d trained himself at work: whenever carrying an impossibly heavy load, just found a spot ahead, tricked yourself—all you had to do was make it that much farther. That scratch in the floorboard his oldest daughter Maple made when she’d dragged out her bed frame, then that gouge in the baseboard the gurney had left, then the vent that August was always dropping pennies down even after Wallace yelled at him, then that set of sandy paws just by the door. Just there. And next would be the outside where Katie’s moon might be waiting.