The Husband

By P.C. Verrone

He has never taken a man for a wife before. This becomes clear as he introduces me to his other wives. The youngest wife bristles and the wife with the long, dark hair avoids meeting my eye. The tallest wife just looks from him to me and nods. Her face betrays no hint of hospitality. They are aware that he and I have exchanged vows, exchanged fluids. However they may feel, nothing can be done about it now. He has chosen me.

He wants a feast to celebrate. We order delivery. When the driver arrives, the youngest wife invites him into the house. She is beautiful and coy, and the driver is stupid. As soon as he steps inside, our husband sinks his teeth into the man’s neck.

At the sight of blood, my eyes fill with red. I leap at the body in our husband’s arms, but a sharp jab in my rib sends me tumbling to the floor. The youngest wife tucks her elbow back against her side as she devours our victim’s clavicle. I reach for a wrist, a thigh, but the wife with long, dark hair kicks me away. The tallest wife glowers at me, lapping at the driver’s neck, inches from our husband’s lips. I can only suck the capillaries from the man’s toes. If our husband notices, he does nothing.

As the sunrise approaches, all five of us descend into the cellar. Four pine boxes glimmer in the scant moonlight. The other wives climb into their own, but he invites me to sleep in his. My fingers dig into the silty soil of his homeland spread across the bottom. In the tight space, he undresses me with ease as I nip at the last vestiges of the delivery boy’s blood on his lips. The sex only partly quenches the starvation in my belly. Afterwards, he snores gently against my back. My nerves are so giddy, I can hardly sleep.

It was meant to be a routine inspection. Some young couple had purchased the old Anderson widow’s place, so I was sent to assess the property. It had lain empty for sixty years, but lately any listing with four walls and a roof was getting snatched up. The agency notified me that they hadn’t located the key for the cellar, so they’d be sending somebody to get me in.

The only access to the house was a mile-long unpaved road off the highway, which eventually led to the state park. As I turned onto the dirt road, the roar of traffic hushed beneath rustling leaves and chittering birds. Under the heavy tree cover, I could hardly tell that the sun was setting. Just when I worried that I had somehow taken a wrong turn, the trees opened up to unveil a small workman’s cottage.

Taking in the sturdy wood walls and pre-war pragmatism of its design, I was struck by a pang of envy. This house had some history to it, nothing like my prefab “dream home” cluttered with trendy appliances. From the outside, the house seemed shockingly well kept. The new homeowners would be pleased to hear that.

When I met him inside, I assumed he was the locksmith the agency had sent, though his formal suit made it seem like he was showing the house rather than unlocking a basement. Dark, slick hair, pale skin, and those eyes. When I shook his hand, something skittered around my ribcage. I don’t remember a thing about the assessment. I’m not sure I did it.

Sometime after the sun vanished over the horizon, he and I ended up on the roof. I listened as he identified constellations and the calls of nightlife. Despite his youthful face, he spoke with the elegance of an older man. Then, he turned to catch me in his gaze.

“You look hungry,” he said.

“Oh, I’ve eaten —”

“No, no,” he said. “Your eyes.” He dragged his thumb across my lips, easing them apart. He asked if he could enter, and I opened for him.

He was completely transparent. The only way to be his was to be like him. He explained that my thirst would only be quenched by human blood, that the sun’s rays would scorch me, that he had three other wives already. I agreed to all of it. The ceremony itself was quick. After I drank from his veins, we left my car along the side of the highway and spent our honeymoon in the woods. Our first night together, we stalked two hikers in the state park, and I had my first taste of human blood. We left them on a trail that had been closed because of “cougar activity.”

When he brought me back to the house, it seemed different than before. The gables and porch shuddered with energy, thrumming with the wind in the treetops. The whole world seemed to have woken up, or maybe it was just me. As my groom guided me up the steps, I knew that I never wanted to sleep again.

We hardly leave his coffin over the next few nights. My naked skin does not feel the autumn chill that penetrates the unfurnished cellar, and yet when I touch his chest or grasp his ass, I feel a current pass between us. I am still getting used to the dearth of some sensations and intensity of others — the numbness and the craving. Fucking helps. In the afterglow, he holds my face in his hands. His eyes refract the moonlight like puddles of water as he whispers, “I love you, my bride.”

His other wives leave us alone except to bring us freshly cleaned towels or meals from the woods. The youngest wife throws these offerings at us like a petulant child, and the wife with long, dark hair still avoids my eyes. The tallest wife delivers her offerings with care and delicacy, though a smile never troubles her lips. After they are gone, he places bloody cuts of sparrows and mice on my tongue like canapés.

I tell him that I hunger for human blood, and he chuckles. “Patience, my bride. Too much of a good thing can spoil it.” I wonder how that could possibly be as I nestle into his chest and dip into a daylight slumber.

When I awaken, he is gone. The lid of the coffin is open, and the room is night-dark. Making my way upstairs, I can hear the other wives in the kitchen. The three of them are sipping from teacups around the table. The youngest wife twirls her silver ringlets in her fingers, smoking a cigarette and chatting in a winnowy voice. The wife with long, dark hair flips through a stack of faded vinyl records in her lap, interjecting every now and then. The tallest wife silently brings her teacup to her lips, sitting like her spine is a steel rod and staring out the window to the moon.

They turn when I enter the doorway. Their eyes bear down on me like wolves, refracting light just like his. Like mine, too, though I can’t consult a mirror to be sure.

I hardly have voice enough to ask, “Where is he?”

The youngest wife and the wife with long, dark hair look away from me. The tallest one sets her teacup on its saucer and says, “He is away.” Then, she adds, “He is often away.” Then she also pretends I am not there.

I descend the stairs once more and lie in the velvet soil of our husband’s coffin. My stomach groans and my body shudders, like it wants to cry. But tears are no longer possible.

I awaken when the tallest wife lifts me out of our husband’s coffin and throws me across the room. The other two wives stand back from her, hardly hiding the amusement on their faces.

“That is his,” she growls. “You cannot keep sleeping in there.”

“But I don’t have one,” I say.

“Then make it.”

The other two wives titter behind her. I want to claw their eyes out, but I am too weak from hunger.

I am allowed to continue sleeping in our husband’s coffin while I build my own. I drag whole trunks of healthy trees back to the house. Even with my new inhuman strength, the work is exhausting. I take frequent breaks from the sawing and stripping and sanding and hammering. I am famished. Sometimes, to keep myself going, I snack on the cockroaches, crickets, and brown recluses that wander into the cellar. Occasionally, a curious fox or raccoon comes sniffing around, though its blood does not satisfy half as well as human would. When my body buckles under the fatigue, I lean against the cellar door, letting the sweat drip down my lifeless skin. I can hear the other wives in the kitchen.

I make the youngest wife insecure. She’s not sure what my being here means about our husband, who he desires. I cut into her idea of him — and by extension, of herself. I gather that this was her house. She is the Anderson widow.

The wife with the long, dark hair does not think a man should be a wife. It’s nothing personal. She used to know men who wanted to be wives back when she was a vaudevillian, but she never really bought it. She felt it was just as much of an act as when she crooned about beating back the men who would take a hand to her.

The tallest wife rarely speaks. I guess that she is probably his first wife. I imagine whatever insecurities she had regarding her marriage have already been played out. Still, I can sense her discomfort in having a man so present in the house. She does not invite me to their table, or into the woods when they go hunt. She does not offer me advice in constructing my coffin, nor anything to quench my thirst. She does not ask how I am doing or who I was before. She does not want me here. But he does, and she makes peace with that.

Whenever I leave the cellar, I usually find the other wives at the table with their teacups. I want to ask them what is in their cups. Is it human? Is it fresh? Are they keeping it somewhere in the house? My belly is gnashing for blood, but I know they will not share. They glare at me, united against the interloper. I go alone to find some animal to drink, or wood to continue building my coffin.

One evening, the police come poking around the house. The other wives treat this as an inevitable nuisance; after all, this is the last location I was meant to be before I disappeared. We lock the cellar door and listen to them knock around the house, then leave. I’m sure they’ve already found my car a mile up the highway, which would suggest that I never actually made it here.

I have my own wife out there, somewhere. We met through mutual friends. I was fresh out of college; she had been couch-surfing for a year. Both of us were ready to take on this “real world” we’d heard so much about. We were too young to be making lifetime commitments, but she liked my taste in music, and I liked that she would spend hours in the sun picking wildflowers. The way we touched made me excited to wake up in the morning. We became best friends who happened to have sex. Then we put it on paper.

After we married, our lives filled up with dreams. The harder, more expensive ones — her plans to backpack across Asia or build a sunroom onto our house — were replaced by more manageable ones: a bigger TV, a pool table in the den, a labradoodle. Neither of us particularly cared about these things, but we were assured that we should. It wasn’t so bad, but after a while, I began to return from readying some wide-eyed newlyweds’ dreamhouse to a place that I hardly recognized, populated with someone else’s ideas of a home. The only part that remained true to us were dreams that stayed dreams, the pie-in-the-sky ones my wife fantasized about in bed. The ones that I couldn’t possibly give her.

I try to imagine if my wife just hadn’t come home one night, when would I have given up looking? When will she?

I wake up in his coffin with him standing over me. “You’re back,” I whisper. I try to shield my excitement with my hurt. I want to be angry. I want to demand why he left me here with these hateful wives. How could he explode my life like that and not even stay?

But he lifts me to his lips. He tastes like everything I’ve ever wanted. He descends onto me, and my body throbs. Afterwards, my head lays on his chest.

“You are making yourself at home, I see,” he hums into my ear. I glance over to the frame of my coffin. It looks rickety and sad next to his — beautiful pine wood with swirling engravings.

“Of course. I love you,” I say.

“I love you too, my bride.”

The next night, he invites the tallest wife into his coffin. I can hear the low thuds of them fucking while I try to build my coffin. After a few hours of failing focus, I decide to wander about the house. It is nothing but bare walls and dusty floors, save for a box-spring mattress in one room, a broken floor lamp in another, and the dilapidated appliances in the kitchen. I have to use my imagination to fill the rooms — a master suite, a den, a home office, a library nook.

The other wives have retired to their coffins, so I sit at the kitchen table and watch the moon until the sky turns rosy with morning, forcing me back to the cellar. He and the tallest wife have settled down now. My coffin is still only a half-made wooden box, and I know better than to try sleeping in hers. I rest my head against the cellar door and close my eyes. I fall in and out of a dreamless slumber, listening to the sounds of the day.

The house is different when he is at home. I rarely see the other wives gathering at the table. We must hunt to bring back offerings for our husband. Everything is an excuse for a feast — the full moon, the west wind, the first snow. Sometimes victims come willingly, other times the wives use our powers to compel meals into the house. After dinner, he invites one of us to his coffin, and the others dispose of the leftovers somewhere the bloodied bodies will be blamed on hit-and-runs or animal attacks.

Even when we are not drinking or fucking, he likes us all to sit together. After a stretch of silence, he will say, “My beautiful family. All together.” We wives nod, and then return to silence.

There are two attempts at orgies. None of the coffins are large enough, so we use the old mattress. But none of the wives are interested in one another and splitting our husband’s attention four ways is less thrilling than we want to admit. After we are done, so many more towels must be washed, and someone must find food since we are all starving. After the second orgy, he returns to individual seduction.

As I work on my coffin, I get accustomed to the sounds of hammering intermingled with the moans of his other wives. When that becomes unbearable, I try to sleep in the half-made box, but never can. So I haunt the rest of the house.

I begin to notice the little ways that the other wives have made this their home. The most obvious is the youngest wife, who lived here long before the rest of us. Around the mattress, she has placed a stack of dog-eared magazines and two framed photographs: a signed headshot of Burt Reynolds and a smiling, youthful G.I. — Anderson, I presume. Beside his photo is an American flag neatly tucked into a triangle.

I imagine the youngest wife standing on the porch with her silver curls, being handed the flag by two soldiers. I imagine the house filled with black, the fridge glutted with Tupperware, and friends offering their condolences. Swiftly, the house drains, the casseroles are eaten up, and the youngest wife is alone in the middle of the wilderness. I imagine a dark and handsome stranger come knocking. How could she not let him in?

On my way to gather more wood, I pick a few wildflowers. When I return home, I place them by the G.I.’s photograph. The youngest wife never comments on them, but the next night I see her wearing them in her hair.

I thumb through the wife with long, dark hair’s vinyl collection. She has quite an eclectic mix — Ma Rainey, Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson. Some nights, I come upon her in the kitchen, reviving some choreography that must have floored her audiences. Her movements are brash and sensuous, crossing decades with ease as they punctuate every lyric. I don’t want no man to put no sugar in my tea. Nasty boys, don’t mean a thing. All I’m asking is for a little respect. It is easy to imagine her inviting a slick, shadowy figure backstage one night. I’m sure she was far from shocked when she began to feel his teeth hard against her neck.

One morning, the town’s only record store reports a break-in. Though the robber somehow evaded the cameras, at least ten vinyls are missing. That evening, I come upon the wife with long, dark hair flipping through her collection, bewildered at how it seems to have grown overnight. Our eyes meet for a moment, but then our husband invites me down to the cellar. As I climb into his coffin, I hear the bass of Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women, Pt.1” streaming down the steps. Our husband asks why I am smiling. I lie and tell him how grateful I am that he chose me tonight.

I find few traces of the tallest wife anywhere in the house. If I did not see her with my own eyes, I might doubt that there was a third wife. Some nights, I clean her teacup and saucer, though she never betrays whether she notices.

Ironically, the evening that I finish my own coffin, he invites me into his. His fingers latch onto my throat just before we both climax, as if reminding that I am his thing. As he lies on top of me with his thumb still pressed under my jawbone, I ask if he thinks his wives have anything in common.

“You all love me. Besides that, I married my wives because each of them gives me something different.”

“What do I give you that the others don’t?” I whisper.

“Something different.”

I sleep deeply with those words ringing in my ears. When I wake, he is gone again.

The real estate agency sends another inspector a few days later. We hear him trying to jimmy the lock on the cellar door, but we four wives push all our weight against it, and it does not budge. Still, this is only a temporary fix. The agency will just send someone else with better tools. The door must come down eventually. The wife with long, dark hair suggests we just drink him. The others agree, but I know how alarming it will appear if the agency loses a second inspector to the same house. Then I have an idea.

I tell the other wives to let him open the door but not attack him. They look at me like I am insane, but as I explain my plan, their outrage wanes. The tallest wife nods and gestures for us to step away. We move down a few steps, ensuring that we remain in the shadows.

The inspector bursts in, nearly stumbling down the stairs. He is surprised to find three women and a man down here. Before he can speak, the tallest wife steps forward. Her puddly eyes deepen. She informs him that he does not see any people in the cellar, but there is a horrific infestation of black mold. The inspector nods and leaves. Our stomachs grumble as the fresh human blood drives away.

That evening, when I come upon the other wives donning their hats and buttoning their coats, the wife with the long, dark hair asks, “Would you like to come hunt with us, chickadee?”

We discover two coeds from a nearby college fondling one another in the back of a sedan parked by a rushing river. The four of us suck them dry — two to a teen — before pushing the car into the river. Teenagers are such reckless drivers.

Even with a full stomach, I am still unable to sleep. The next night, I bring this up to the other wives.

The tallest wife strokes my arm and says, “You need to add your home soil.”

I throw some dirt from around the house into my coffin. Still, I toss and turn all day.

The tallest wife informs me that the tea they drink is a sort of appetite suppressant brewed from wolfsbane. When I drink it, the grumbling in my stomach becomes less urgent.

“We have to pace ourselves,” she reminds me.

“And here I thought you all had some kind of stash,” I say.

The tallest wife frowns. “Blood doesn’t keep.”

“I know,” I say, “I just thought . . .” That there was an exception, a loophole, a way to avoid the pain that isn’t just sacrifice. The other wives all exchange a look, and I can tell what they’re thinking. Men.

We sit around the kitchen table listening to music and swapping stories. The wife with long, dark hair details century-old backstage gossip. The youngest wife recites a series of raunchy poems from a book that her first husband left in his study. I reenact my go-to story about the mall Santa that split his pants in front of my first-grade class, which keeps everyone in stitches for five minutes.

The tallest wife tells a story about a mysterious man who came to her village looking for shelter. He was half-dead when he appeared on her doorstep. She invited him in and nursed him back to health while he told her fantastical stories about his homeland. The man fell in love with her and begged her to come with him when he was well enough. Though his stories intrigued her, she assured him that the village was her home. But the moment her guest returned to proper health, he revealed himself to be a trickster. He stole one of her father’s horses and kidnapped her, fleeing into the night. She never saw her village again.

I ask her why she agreed to marry him under those circumstances. The tallest wife furrows her brow. “I have only been married to our husband.”

This is how we spend our nights when our husband is away: chatting and teasing and occasionally hunting. Sometimes, we accompany the youngest wife to her first husband’s grave. Sometimes there are fights; often, the wife with long, dark hair starts them. The tallest wife maintains her quiet and seems to relax more. She retires earliest and sleeps in.

I continue to collect soil from around the town. I have lived here for over a decade, yet I never sleep in my coffin as soundly as I slept in our husband’s. I am always the first to pick up the chore, to suggest a hunt, to get the tea brewing, to pour less than my full cup despite my gnawing belly. I’m not sure if the others notice, but I don’t need them to. I’m doing my part. It’s true, we are all different, but we hold dance parties and go for night hikes and commiserate about our hunger together, always together.

And then our husband returns.

Soon after our husband returns, the police come looking for me again. Then, the private investigators. The wives turn each of them away with the false memory that there is nothing in the cellar but black mold.

Still, they keep coming. Urban explorers and true-crime podcasters, ghost hunters and supernatural television personalities complete with camera crews, then another wave of law enforcement who have decided to reopen the case. Their viewers, their listeners, their citizens will be disappointed to learn that there is nothing in the house but some dust, an old tea set, and a whole lot of black mold. But they don’t stop looking. Someone is watching the house night and day. We drink pots and pots of wolfsbane tea. Feeding on humans is out of the question.

The youngest wife cannot keep up her vivacity and skulks around the house. The wife with long, dark hair becomes shorter with everyone. The tallest wife lets the chores go. I am so hungry I can hardly think straight.

Our husband grows distant. He says he loves us. He says what a gift it is to have us all spend this time together, but we can tell that he wants to leave.

“I just wanted something different,” he tells me one evening as we share his coffin. “I did not think it would be so complicated. They have never been this persistent.”

Later, I ask the tallest wife if this is true. She nods. “People gave up looking for us much more easily.”

“But why?”

She looks at me with her usual mix of warmth and disdain. “The world is used to losing women, but not a man.”

“What about all the men we drink?”

“We let them find those bodies. The world would not allow a man to just disappear into the night.” Her eyes flash, refracting her contempt. “You two should have considered that.”

Then she storms off. I can’t blame her. We’re all starving. All of us pretend we aren’t as hungry as we really are, sipping placebo tea to keep up appearances as our husband desires. I should defer to him, let him lead the way. But I cannot spend eternity pretending this is still the home we made together. So I leave.

The driveway looks empty with only my wife’s car parked on the pavement. I am wearing the same pants that I left the house in, but I have misplaced the key, so I ring the doorbell. When she answers, she is ten years older. The decade that I have been gone comes crashing down on me.

The shock on my wife’s face gives way to a messy mélange of joy and anger, until it finally settles on suspicion. “You look so young,” she says.

I take her hand, feeling unfamiliar calluses, and meet her eyes with mine. She gasps, and I know that my eyes are like his, like the other wives’. I ignore my growing desire to drink her blood.

“Stop looking for me,” I say, imbuing my voice with all the tenderness I have ever felt. “Please.” As I leave, I grab a handful of soil from the front yard. Back at the house, the youngest wife is trying to referee an argument between our husband and the wife with long, dark hair as the tallest wife dozes in her coffin. I toss the soil into mine and lay down. Sleep does not come.

We four wives sit silently around the kitchen table, guzzling a third pot of tea when we hear a knock at the door. Our husband has snuck out to the woods to scrounge for rats or stray cats to eat — or, maybe, he’s just trying to avoid us — but he would not knock. The other wives glance at me. It is my turn to tell the tale of the black mold.

When I answer the door, my wife pushes past me into the house. I chase after her until she stops in her tracks at the kitchen. The rest of the wives look at her like cornered wolves. Slowly, they begin to rise from the table, their teeth flashing in the moonlight. I dash in front of my wife and bear my own terrible teeth at my fellow brides. I know I am asking too much. None of us have tasted human blood in so long, and a meal has just barged into our sanctuary. But she is my wife.

Finally, the other wives settle and turn away from us. I turn to my wife. Her eyes are scanning every detail of the kitchen, the house, the women.

“What are they?” she whispers in my ear. She does not seem afraid, only curious.

“We are his brides,” I tell her.

She turns to leave, but the open door to the cellar catches her eye. She peeks her head inside, surveying the five coffins. “Which is yours?” she asks, but before I can answer, she points to mine.

I nod. “I built it myself.”

I insist on walking her back to her car. I cannot risk her meeting our husband. There is another car parked on the grass a few yards away, likely that novelist writing a supernatural thriller based on the rumors of the house. I keep my face turned towards my wife, who continues to take in everything. Her face is filled with wonder. The night breeze plays in her hair. Intermingled with my desire for her blood is an old longing.

When we reach her car, she says, “I wanted to see what had stolen you from me.” She places my face in her hands, studying my puddly eyes. “This doesn’t feel real.”

“It feels more real than anything to me,” I say.

“More than what we had?”

I hold her hand to my cheek. “Yes. Except for the love. I never stopped loving you.”

She brings our lips together. When we separate, she whispers, “Me neither.” Then she gets into her car and disappears down the road.

When I return to the kitchen, the other wives ice me out. I lie awake in my coffin, listening to the night become day.

Another home inspector arrives, which is unusual. That young couple has long moved on from this property. With the house’s reputation, who would want to buy it? We all loiter by the cellar door, waiting for him to open it so that we can inform him of the black mold. But he never tries the cellar, and after only a few minutes, we hear him driving off.

I am wrapped up in our husband when the tallest wife barges in and insists that I must come immediately. Our husband hisses her away, but she is steadfast. I pull myself off of him, too confused to be apologetic, and follow the tallest wife to the front door.

My wife is standing on the grass, a backpack slung over one arm and a suitcase in the other. When I go to her, she says that she sold our old house and has just closed on this one.

A wave of panic grips my stomach. I try to tell her how difficult it is for our kind. She will always be hungry and never be able to bask in the sunlight that she loves so much. But she shakes her head. “I don’t want to be like you.”

I frown. “Then . . . how will we . . .”

“We’ll make it work.”

I recognize the conviction in her eyes, and I realize what this is. Another pie-in-the-sky dream. I sigh. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know. But I want to,” she says. “Don’t you?”

Of course I do. I want to say how much I’ve missed her; how much I wish that I could bring her into this fantastic night world. But it isn’t about me; it’s about him and them. As I consider sending my wife away — compelling her if I must — that sureness in her eyes stops me. Maybe this is a dream I can finally give her.

When we step into the house hand-in-hand, the other wives have all gathered in the foyer. Their eyes dart between the two of us and our husband, who stands in the center glaring at us. I realize that my hair is still mussed and my skin still hot from our arrested coitus. My wife and our husband size one another up.

Finally, he snarls, “That is my bride.”

“He was mine first,” my wife says.

Our husband’s eyes dart to me, an infinite feedback loop of night, demanding an explanation. I begin to think how foolish this idea is. This is too far, too different. But then I remember why he married me.

I square my shoulders and tell him, “This is our new groom.” Then I walk past them all to show my wife her new home.

The youngest wife enjoys having a day husband and wonders why we didn’t think of this sooner. The wife with long, dark hair is suspicious as to whether a woman can really be a husband, but she is willing to see it out. I do not know the tallest wife’s opinion of the whole thing, but I see her smile much more often when she watches the moon.

Our night husband has been gone for quite a while. The minute our day husband called off the law enforcement and ordered the onlookers off her property, he vanished. We are not sure when he will be back, but there’s enough to do here without him. There are new linens to be washed and furniture to be built. The old box spring has been replaced with a new mattress, as it wouldn’t make sense for our day husband to sleep in a coffin. The electricity has allowed us to add a speaker system alongside the record player and an electric kettle for our tea. The wives are unsure whether these are improvements, but they’re something different, and they make our day husband happy.

She does not force us together and expect feasts. Sometimes we include her in our night hikes and dance parties, but often, she is also away, visiting friends or vacationing in exotic destinations. She always wanted to travel, and with everything taken care of at home, now she has the time. Though the wives must suppress our desire to drink her blood, we hunt enough to ward off disaster. We wonder if she’s going to bring home a fifth wife one day, since that is what husbands do. For now, four satisfies.

When our day husband chooses one of us for the night, a silent but electric jealousy passes amongst the rest, even more potent than with our night husband. When she chooses me, I feel the prickle of my fellow wives’ umbrage as I climb into the new bed. Sometimes we have sex, but sometimes we just wrap ourselves in her pillowy sheets and pretend.

“How was your day at the office, honey?”

“Wonderful, dear. Did you remember to make those cookies for the bake sale?”

Then we laugh until I hear her start to snore. I nestle beside her, listening to the forest wind hum through the eaves. Sometimes I swear that I can even hear the rich earth beneath us. I close my eyes and, even though it is night, I slip in the best sleep I’ve ever had.

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “THE HUSBAND” by P. C. Verrone, and if you enjoyed that then there’s a couple of other stories he’s had out; you can purchase FIYAH issue #29 from the start of last year to read his debut “Last Kiss”, a story which “blurs the lines between first contact with extraterrestrials and the colonization of the Americas through the eyes of a young translator”; or you can buy the anthology Elemental Forces from Flame Tree Press to read “A Review of Slime Tutorial: The Musical“, a story he describes as “inspired by my love and frustration with the state of the American Theatre, as well as the campiness of The Blob.” Links to purchase both of these are on his website pcverrone.com, which is also where you’ll see the recent and exciting news of his debut novel, Tar Baby, being acquired by Catapult–so keep an eye on his website, or his Bluesky @‌pcverrone.com, for updates on when that will be released.

For today’s story, P.C. sent us these notes: I wrote this a few months after marrying my husband. It was strange navigating all these heavily-gendered, heteronormative newlywed moments as two men. At the same time, I was thinking a lot about vampires, and I wanted to explore the inherent queerness of a man entering a situation similar to Dracula’s Brides. That idea became this story.

Thank you, PC, for that background and for the story. I spent a lot of my life—including far too much of my married life—thinking that love was a feeling, and that being a feeling it was therefore infinite: after all, when you have a second child, you don’t love your first any less, do you?

But we don’t judge people by their intentions, we judge them by their actions: think of how many people uphold and permit systemic racism but then deny being racist, or say they love and respect women even as they participate in and perpetuate an atmosphere of misogynistic harassment. Intentions are meaningless to the people impacted by your actions: we all know what the road to hell is paved with, after all. Likewise, love is not worth anything if it’s only ever the feeling in your heart and your head—only ever the intention. Love cannot be measured in your internal experience, but in how you manifest the emotion, and show the other person. Love is not a state but an action; love is not a noun but a verb.

For the people around you, their experience of your love is not the feeling you have. They cannot see inside your head, they cannot know it is real, they cannot do anything with that surge of emotion. No, the truth of your love is the time and attention and energy you give them: and not a one of time, attention or energy are infinite. We each have a limited amount in any given day, week, year, life, and it is how we choose to use that finite time, attention and energy that shows people how much we love them and lets them know it is real.

Because it shows how much we are prioritising them over everything else in the zero sum game that is a mortal lifespan. We may feel like we can love more and more people, that the well of emotion is bottomless and that love for a new person does not lessen the love you already have for others: but the time we have in a day to spend with those we love can only go so far, and the more people you need to give it to, the less there is for each of them, and if you are giving it all to someone new then those you profess to still love as much as before are necessarily pauperised of your attention.

The same, of course, goes for all the other demands on your time: the hours you work at your job, the time you spend online, the hours of your hobby of choice. To love someone is to put them before yourself: to love someone is to be selfless.

January is, statistically, the most depressing month, with the lights and excitement of all the winter festivals behind us, with only cold and darkness ahead for weeks in the northern hemisphere. So give some of your time—and attention, and energy, and love—to the people you love in the days ahead, so that they know you do.