I awoke at precisely 3.02 a.m., my internal alarm screaming at me – something was wrong. I reached for my phone on the nightstand and pressed the home button, the light blinding me and causing me to squint as I checked the time. Rubbing my eyes, I listened, wondering what it was that could have woken me.
Over the whirring and knocking of the off-balanced ceiling fan that I had been meaning to fix for three years, I could barely hear the crying coming from the bathroom. I slide my hand to my wife’s side of the bed, and felt sheets where her body should have been, not that I needed to confirm it was her in our bathroom, but kind of hoping I was just hearing things, too. Sitting up on my elbow, I called out to her, “Maggie, are you ok?”
The crying stopped and I could tell she was doing her best not to concern me as she softly said from behind the closed-door, “I’m fine, honey. Go back to sleep.”
‘I’m fine.’ The two words in every woman’s vocabulary that ignites a primal fear in every man’s heart. Taking a deep breath, I propped myself up and swung my legs out over the edge of the bed. I wasn’t going to be going back to sleep, and I knew that if I did, sometime in the next fifteen years, this moment would be used against me in a court of matrimonial argument. So, I resigned myself to my course of action and made for the bathroom door.
I had to tread carefully, because the literal minefield of our bedroom floor could be littered with any number of children’s toys, balled up clothes, or left out shoes, each one spelling doom for me if I stepped wrong. However, the loud hissing shriek of the cat as I stepped on his tail was not something I was expecting, and as I jumped up off of him, I fell backwards into the wall I was using to support my half-asleep self, knocking over the lamp on the dresser and sending it crashing to the floor.
Without missing a beat, my wife called out from the bathroom, “Are you ok?”
Now, mind you, I’m a smart-alex to begin with, but as I sat there, on the floor with my pride firmly shattered next to the lamp, and the cat nuzzling up to me, I just calmly said back to her, “I’m fine honey. Go back to sleep.”
Filed under: Flash Fiction Tagged: MMWM
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