Ian Williams/Fiction

Cactus

I’m doing my best to be nice this evening because I forgot that Tuesday I was supposed to watch Becky so my wife could go shopping for a dress for her second sister’s wedding, so I worked late, as the official story goes (unofficial story: I was online for an hour and fifteen minutes looking at GPS systems), which meant my wife either had to take Becky with her, into dressing rooms and all that, or cancel her plans, which is what she ended up doing, and man, she spat some serious fire when I came in sighing from my rough 9 to 5, now 7:30, until I promised I’d make it up to her by finding a sitter for Becky (not good enough) and taking part of Thursday off so we could go dress shopping for beluga’s wedding.

Sorry. I’m trying. I’m trying. But Lana’s trying to make me suffer. And, at this point, I’m bent on making her suffer by not suffering. This is mall number three, store someone help me. She steps out of the dressing room in a — how to put it nicely— in a dress that —

You look like a freaking cactus, I say.

Yeah, and what do you want me to wear? A quilt? You haven’t done one thing to support me all day.

I took half a day off.

But it’s like you’re not even here.

I gave you my opinion on the dress. What do you want?

Saying your wife, your wife, looks like a cactus is not an opinion, Randall.

The dress looks like a cactus, I say. You expect me to dance with you in that? Bad enough I have to dance with your whale sister.

The dress is strapless, floor length, with vertical ridges down the front from which pieces of plastic jut out like spikes. And it’s cinched tight in the middle so the top part of the dress looks puffy and the bottom part, well, poofy.

You said I look like a cactus.

The dress. You look like —

Lana rustles forward, picking up the skirt and wagging her shoulders. I look like what?

Like a fool. Then I add, In that dress. Then I add, Friggin’ cactus dress.

As Lana’s advancing to puncture me, the door of the adjacent booth opens and out spins a woman wearing a— wearing a dress that’s too small for her, that stretches uncomfortably over post pregnancy belly fat and that remains open at the back, showing the line of her bra strap, although she is trying to hold the dress closed.

When Lana sees my eyes focus behind her, she whooshes around, expecting perhaps a leggy Scandinavian type, and not this chunky, lonely thing. The woman has no one to help her with the zipper. How does she look? No one to tell her.

About the author:

Ian Williams is the author of Not Anyone’s Anything (stories, Freehand, 2011) and You Know Who You Are (poems, Wolsak and Wynn, 2010).  He completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is currently an English professor at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. He divides his time between Ontario and Massachusetts.