ARRHYTHMIA
It was getting harder for Eugene to hide his condition: his fingers twitched at odd times, and his heart worked a little too hard to maintain its jaunty rhythm, and while it seemed these symptoms had, so far, escaped his wife's notice, how much longer could she overlook his despair?-how could she not sense, for example, his utter hopelessness when confronted by the swell of appliances that had washed up onto his work bench: a heap of disrepair he didn't have the dexterity to fix anymore, except on Saturday nights when ten-year-old Lily-sworn to secrecy!-loaned him her hands, and Lily's household repair skills, he had to admit, were uncanny: last week when she had worked on a broken toaster, her fingers had seemed to hear the faulty connection in the coils, and, afterwards, praising her, his voice had warbled with pride; but tonight when she tugged a TV out from the bottom of the pile, a surge of fear swept through him-(Children, don't try this at home!)-but wasn't it important, he asked himself, to test her skill?-and so he plugged the TV in and turned it on, and together they laughed at the way Marshal Matt Dillon stretched diagonally across the screen, and then, still laughing, Eugene unplugged the set and unscrewed its back, revealing a hulking CRT surrounded by a nest of wires, and once more, he brushed away his trepidation as Lily's gaze wandered the circuits, and he brushed it away again when her fingers began probing their connections … and so it was that he was a second too late in slapping her hand away from the CRT-Careful! The residual charge!-and in the moment of contact, before his pulse skittered to a stop, he remembered Lily's birth, and the way her head had appeared and her eyes had popped open (blue as an argon spark) and the secret that had traveled from him back to her back to him.
©Stephanie Harrison, first published in Gulf Coast
Updated 09/02/10
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