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She dreamed he was on her television giving a testimony about chicken pot pies.
It was one of those religious channels. He was speaking into the camera about how much better a chicken pot pie is when it is made with lard. How it had made such a difference in his life and how he told his friends about it, encouraging them to make chicken pot pies with a lard crust. His eyes were lit up in a sort of religious fervor and his animated hands were gesturing wildly. She woke up with a pounding headache and dialed his number on her cell. A woman answered with a high pitched voice and so she turned off her phone and walked toward the bathroom and washed the crust from her eyes, tried to scrub the night from her soul. Her thumbnail had turned black from where she slammed it in the car door and she examined it while she ran the bathwater and undressed and the hot water felt good. She was thinking of their last night together. How he told her about the woman he dated who had tried to kill him while he slept.
He said he always found women like that, women that wanted to strangle him in the middle of the night. He showed her a tiny scar on his neck. "That was with a K-bar," he told her. She wasn't sure what a K-Bar was but was pretty sure it was a type of knife.
She just laughed and kissed the scar but wondered if she was like those women. She was pretty sure she didn't have a K-bar. She felt like a normal woman, even if she got a bit hysterical at times. One time she got hysterical in an electronics superstore. She screamed at the store manager and they all looked at her like she was nuts. She went back to that store eventually because there were no other electronic s superstores in her town and they probably didn't remember and she was wearing new sunglasses which cut down the glare on her eyes.
**
She called him the next day and the same woman answered but that woman brought him the phone. She told him about the dream with the chicken pot pies and he laughed and said that as it turns out he had worked in television briefly in the late eighties. He worked as a cameraman for a local news channel and how he got drunk after work every night because his wife had left him that year and all his dreams seemed to be fading away just like a bad camera trick.
"How have you been?" he asked her and she said fine and told him she was living by herself for the first time in her whole life and it felt good to do that. He told her he had to go but could she call him next week? she said sure and the call ended.
**
She felt of her own body in the night. She thought to herself that this body which she touched was her own and no longer belonged to a man. This body was all hers which she began to know again. There were no pets to take care of. No dogs or fish or cats to feed. No barking, only the soft sounds of a party at the pub across the street.
**
In the morning she drives to the grocery store and finds that a small crowd has gathered near the front doors and a police car is parked on the street and a man is on the ground and the police are cuffing him .Everyone is staring at the man while they hold on to the hands of small children or hold their groceries tight to their chests. She walks in the grocery store and walks to the condiments aisle and looks for the tabasco sauce. She is making a Thai recipe and she needs the hot sauce.
He calls her later in the week and she tells him about the man being cuffed on the ground outside of the grocery store. He tells her about his new job and about go-karting with his son.
Melanie Browne's work can be seen at various places online including Word Riot, Yellow Mama, 34th Parallel, Pulp Metal Magazine, and Madswirl. Work forthcoming in The Legendary, Writer's Bloc (Rutger's), and Mad Hatters Review (The Mad Bunkers issue). She lives in Texas with her husband and three children.