The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens Read Free Book Online

she couldn’t hear
     the obeast. In the field of her flora and fauna, a silent battle had been waged and won. Mary Brody was free.
    A trip to the Leaford Library confirmed it. Parasites.
Worms.
Not pinworms, though. And not roundworms. Something else. Thicker than thread, the color of fat under chicken skin. She couldn’t
     find a picture of them. Parasites found in animal excrement, viable in dirt, likely contracted by eating unwashed fruits or
     vegetables—gardening without gloves.
    Home from the Leaford Library, after Irma’d announced it was time to get dinner over with, Orin noticed that she only picked
     at her roast, and slathered butter over her baked potato but didn’t eat it. Her mother put a hand to her daughter’s forehead,
     but Mary assured Irma that she felt fine. And she seemed fine. Better than fine. Her secret was a symbiotic, not parasitic,
     affair.
    Having lost her appetite completely, feeling no ill effects save the constant but, Mary would conclude, bearable itching of
     her anus, Mary only nibbled bits of each meal those first weeks of summer—enough, she hoped, to sustain her occupants. Each
     trip to the bathroom was agony, as she feared the disappearance of her saviors. She tallied their numbers, keeping mental
     charts, and by the time sweet corn was ready—noting a marked decrease in population, had panicked that her army might be deploying
     altogether. Mary surprised her mother by offering to help in the garden. She stopped washing her hands. She began making long,
     twice-daily treks to the park near the river, where, with a spoon from the cutlery drawer, she shoveled dirt and ate it, hopeful
     that in one mound hid a nugget that might colonize her anew.
    At first Mary didn’t notice her melting flesh, and didn’t celebrate her reduction the way Irma and Orin did. She accepted
     their pride in her achievement, though it was not strictly hers, with grunts and tight smiles. “Keep it up, Murray,” Orin
     remarked, watching her decline a coconut cupcake, “and none of the cousins’ll recognize you at the reunion this fall.” Mary
     thought that a funny thing to say, for she was certain the Brody cousins had never really looked at her before, and would
     have no context for comparison.
    On that day of the Brody family reunion, wearing her new Jordache jeans, Mary was several times mistaken for her cousin Quinn’s
     new girlfriend, who they’d all been told in strictest confidence was a stripper from Detroit! They laughed about it, Irma
     and Orin and Mary, each for personal reasons, but their shared amusement was a major source of the day’s remembered pleasures.
    Finding her greatest satisfaction in freedom—no longer enslaved, her mind not occupied with the details of food—Mary felt
     expanded and dared to imagine her future. She pored over magazines that offered courses in fashion and design. She looked
     in the mirror frequently, obsessively, not admiring herself but struck by the simple truth in her eyes. She was not hungry.
     Still. Not. Hungry. She took her gift money and walked all the way to the Kmart to buy several coordinating outfits in her
     new size. She felt the muscles in her stride. The lengthening of her torso. The swing of her shiny dark hair. She continued
     to eat dirt. She decided to get a part-time job.
    Mary’s Aunt Peg, recently retired from the pharmacy department at Raymond Russell Drugstore, had heard that Ray Russell Sr.
     was looking for a girl to work front cash. The staff already knew Mary. In a town so small, with only one pharmacy, the staff
     knew the whole of Leaford with embarrassing intimacy. Mary had spent more than the average amount of time at the back desk,
     waiting for her parents’ prescriptions, and felt at home amidst the clove oil and Metamucil.
    It would have been impossible to consider such a position just months before, since Raymond Russell had the largest assortment
     of Laura Secord chocolate in Baldoon County; the