How to Save a Marriage by Pete Prokesch

After twenty-seven days Lizzy found Ralph utterly repulsive and she found herself utterly not pregnant. She started nitpicking his physical details. The strange mole near his nipple. The drool that pooled in his beard when he was aroused. The way he went slightly cross-eyed when he came. And yet, he insisted on eye contact. To connect. For love. For the baby. And his dirty talk was out of hand. Sometimes she wished he’d actually shit on her. At least it’d make the sex more interesting.

On day twenty-eight Lizzy’s yoga teacher texted her a link—an article on manifesting and visualization. So that night, a few minutes in and barely wet, Lizzy closed her eyes and imagined a baby deep inside her womb—moving towards the light. Rather than Ralph, she was stretched by this future baby—pausing before birth to deliciously twist from side to side and hit all her spots. The ones Ralph couldn’t reach. Just the thought of her baby giggling and writhing in her spread warmth to her limbs and she writhed too, and gripped the edge of the sheets and she was full, full, full and she screamed out and Ralph chuckled—proud of himself—the idiot that he was—while her body shook as if coursed with lightning.

But she opened her eyes after she came and there was no baby. There was only Ralph’s poop face and she felt him spasm amidst her disgust. But, dutiful aspiring mother that she was, she spread her legs in happy baby pose and hooked her big toes with her fingers—like her yoga teacher taught her—and she twisted and rolled and ensured that Ralph’s sad seed found all the rivets and tributaries inside of her and reached that fertile spot.

But the next morning she awoke with the same ravenous appetite and another negative sign on the plastic stick. And that night as she undressed Ralph she noticed more disgust—the thinness of his lower lip and his oddly hairless calves. But after he entered she closed her eyes and imagined her future baby filling her and the lightning would surge through her limbs and she’d cry out and crave the day she’d replace Ralph with her baby boy.

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Pete Prokesch is a writer from the Boston area. His fiction has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Four Way Review, and Evergreen Review, among others, and he has received support from Mass Cultural Council. He also works in green building. You can read his stories at peteprokesch.com.

Illustration by Marcus Renninger

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