If Only by Joe Baumann
If only he had said yes to a second glass of wine. Because then he would have had a third, and probably a fourth, and so would she, because she was always matching him drink for drink. They’d have gone to bed woozy and woken dry-mouthed, groaning at the sunshine darting through his blinds. They’d have played rock, paper, scissors to see who had to trudge to the convenience store for long johns and crappy coffee, both of them knowing, as they rapped their curled fists against their palms, that no matter the result he would pull on gym shorts and a tank top—because it was summer and he was in the best shape of his life and had good reason to show off his shoulders—while she waited for him to come back and when he did they would eat their donuts in bed, smearing each other with grainy icing and licking it off each other’s necks and fingers and that would lead to all of their clothes coming off, their coffees discarded on his nightstand. They would have made love with the windows open because there was something about the breezes and sunshine that, even in their hungover state, would make their bodies tingle, their orgasms intensify, even though the obnoxious, fit folks running and power-walking by could see their bare asses and chests if they glanced toward his house at the right angle.
If he’d had that wine, he wouldn’t have instead drank a glass of water and, in the morning, taken advantage of his energy and verve and leapt out of bed while she turned onto her side and gathered his Nieman Marcus sheets around her body like a shroud. He wouldn’t have gone outside to mow the lawn because it was very much overdue, and he wouldn’t have been humming and thinking about her waiting for him, probably ready to join him in the shower when he was finished, slick with sweat, grassy stubble stuck to his calves, and he wouldn’t have missed the tiny something or other nestled in the path. He wouldn’t have run that something over, a baby rabbit, he would later and forever be convinced, too small, too terrified by the blasting growl of the mower’s engine, to dash off, very much alive and then very much not. And his shoes and ankles wouldn’t have been covered in viscera and fur and little splinters of bone, and he wouldn’t have shut off the mower and stared down at the gore, puffy and mauled and awful, and he wouldn’t have stumbled inside, leaving his bloodied shoes in a heap in front of the step leading into the kitchen from the garage.
And he would not have been morose for next several days. He would not have stared at the indistinct bone and innards each morning as he backed out of the driveway, wouldn’t have watched them slowly disappear, either from rot or rain or pillaging by other wildlife he had not managed to slaughter. He would not have looked at her with half-moon eyes and deep tiredness when she loosed exhortations for him to tell her what’s wrong, him shaking his head, her gritting her teeth and throwing up her hands and telling him that she couldn’t, wouldn’t deal with him like this and she wouldn’t have tripped on his shoes, those bloodied shoes, as she left through the garage. She would not have gone tumbling and smacked her head, hard, on the passenger-side mirror of his car, and blood wouldn’t have gone splashing down her forehead in a gory veil, and he wouldn’t have hauled her to the hospital where the attending doctor smiled at her, and he wouldn’t have watched her smiling back and suddenly known that things were about to be very, very over between them because something had already grown up betwixt her and the doctor, who didn’t say anything about no visitors during the stitching up process but it was clear there was only room for the two of them.
If only he’d drank that second glass of Sangiovese, she wouldn’t have left the hospital with an awful square of gauze on her forehead, a small moan echoing from her throat. The drive to his house would not have been silent and ticking with tension, and he wouldn’t have seen the last tiny mound of the dead animal on the lawn, and he wouldn’t have stopped the car before he made it into the garage, and he wouldn’t have leaned over her in the passenger’s seat and tapped the window and said, “That is what has been wrong with me.” And he would have not then driven into the garage, giving her no chance to see what he was pointing at, and they would not have sat in the silent, hot space long enough for the automatic light to tick off, and she wouldn’t have said that she didn’t think she could do this anymore, and he wouldn’t have nodded and said nothing.
She would not have left that day. He would not have sent texts that asked what he should do with her toothbrush and the bra he found beneath his bed and her leftover Mexican crammed into the back of his fridge behind a tower of St. Pauli Girl bottles. He wouldn’t have seen, seven months later, the announcement of her engagement to the doctor he had watched push stitches into the skin of her forehead, drawing her injury shut like he was mending the broken spine of a book. He would have been the one pressed up against her as she smiled into a camera, a modest diamond sparkling on her finger. He would not have felt a bite in his stomach, a marble in his throat, a vacuum in his lungs.
If only, he thought, she’d brought white wine instead of red, he’d have drank that second glass. If only she’d done that, where might he be.
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Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Phantom Drift, Passages North, Emerson Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3, and many others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. His first short story collection, The Plagues, will be released by Cornerstone Press in 2023. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com
