CW: None.

My wife sometimes asked what had gone wrong with us. She had always been our bank of compassion, the caretaker of our marriage, the one who diagnosed what was needed to keep us on track, and made sure that it was provided.

I evaded the question. How could I tell her that somehow, along the way, she had transformed from the most beautiful person I had ever known to a grotesquerie, something it hurt me to even look at?

She had no eyes, was the problem.

Except that she of course had eyes. She could see. She could navigate the world without stumbling. She read paperback murder mysteries for fun. She was sharp-eyed, remarking on things I had failed to notice, pointing them out to me, wondering aloud how I had managed to avoid seeing them. Photos of her still captured the same face she had always possessed. I established early on that what had vanished to my own eyes was still among her features, that people could see the bright blue irises that to me had once eclipsed the sky. Her perfect breasts, worn beneath a pink sweater, had been the first things I noticed, but then I looked at her face, and those eyes had seized me. It had almost been comical, back then. I was never the kind of man who stammered, but I stammered meeting her.

The memory of those eyes still called to me. But to me she no longer had eyes.

She had black, empty sockets.

The skin around where those eyes should have been had retreated, leaving a pair of gaping holes containing a blackness that was not in the slightest diluted by light. To look at those eyes was to know that nothing existed behind them, not flesh, not bone, not the brain that housed her incandescent mind: just space, deeper than her head could have contained. To look at those empty spaces was to know that if I could fit myself through those holes I would drift through the vacuum beyond, forever, and this terrified me, even though I knew that everything I failed to see was still there, substantial to the touch, but invisible, revealing only the face of death behind them.

• • • •

I had fallen out of love with her at some point before this happened. I don’t know why. She had done nothing. She remained as sweet and attentive as always. But the passion I had once felt for her, the little electric shock that I’d once felt whenever making contact with those bright eyes, had faded for me, first becoming overfamiliarity and then transforming into boredom, before settling in at contempt. I had no idea why what should have lasted a lifetime began to fade after only three years. Maybe some people only have a limited supply of love that fails to replenish once it’s spent, and I was one of them. Maybe for some people it is replaced by hate, while for others like me it only becomes trapped emptiness. All I knew was that loving her, being a good man for her, became a performance, something I had to do to live up to what she expected; and also that one day, during a conversation of no real consequence, I remembered that I had to look at her and found instead of those brilliant blue eyes a pair of black circles, containing the emptiness that had long since replaced the space where I had once stored adoration.

I recoiled.

She thought I was sick. She put me to bed.

She gazed down at me as she covered me with her grandmother’s quilt and promised me it was all right.

Did I still feel terror?

Of course.

When I realized that I was the only person who saw it, did I remain silent?

Of course.

I did not get used to it. But I grew used to not being used to it.

I endured.

• • • •

She knew that things had cooled between us. She sometimes talked about it. She said that this was something that happened in marriages—though she said “relationships.” She reminded me that it had happened between my parents, who had for much of my childhood abided in a state of genial contempt, punctuated with little spoken cruelties. Sometime after I moved out of the house I came home to visit and my father left on a little errand, at which point my mother glanced at me with tears in her eyes and said, “I’ve really come to hate that man.” It was not the first time she’d said that to me, and I said something to the effect that I was tired of hearing it. If she really hated him that much, I said, she should leave while it was still possible to get herself a life. She muttered what she always did, that it was already too late. She did nothing. But then he left, and sometime after showed up at a family gathering with a woman twenty years younger than himself, someone he’d met at work but, thank God, not a secretary; the two of them had looked upon each other with undisguised, goopy affection, sickening in its intensity but easy to distinguish from what my mother said it was in private: some old idiot, seduced by a predatory gold-digging bimbo. No, she loved him. And he loved her, and even if she was sometimes mistaken for a daughter it was impossible to avoid seeing that he had with her what he’d never had with Mom. He didn’t live long enough for the second marriage to be poisoned by that creeping contempt, and Mom, Mom, well, Mom died a short time afterward, having held on long enough to bottle her satisfaction.

My wife reminded me of that and then she reminded me of her parents, who were still together, though the love was not. They existed in a silence that persisted even when my wife visited, her father a fixture of an easy chair facing reactionary television, her mother a spectral presence who kept finding excuses to retreat to the kitchen, even when it was clean and she was not cooking anything. They were separate inhabitants of a space where their paths rarely intersected, and if they ever spoke when it was not absolutely necessary, I rarely saw it. A few visits and I would not have been surprised to see one walk through the other without a ripple, like the ghosts they had become while alive.

“It happens,” my wife said, once. “They used it up.”

And maybe that was happening between her and me, though that hardly explained why her skin continued to retreat from her face, if only for me. Before long her nose was another gaping hole between cheeks that had grown papery and transparent before they also disappeared, revealing the rictus of her teeth. Her smile had once been as dazzling as her eyes, a bright row of pearls that beamed affection at me, at dogs, at random children encountered in public. She had warmed every room with the light of that smile, with the loving energy that she beamed at the world, and as the last of her flesh peeled away to reveal the bleached image of death, she still did; just, no longer at me. I had to pay extra attention to her tone of voice, to her body language, to her posture as she faced me, to know whether she was happy, or sad, or troubled, or deeply angry, and sometimes she said that I had stopped paying attention to her. The man who had once known at once whether she’d had a bad day or a good one no longer registered that she was scowling out of resentment at something I’d done, or failed to do; he’d disappeared, while still remaining present, the way her father had, the way I’d always promised her I never would.

One day she folded arms that were now also in the process of becoming skeletal and said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” I had no answer for her, but I made up something: one of those lies that what had gone wrong with us was not her, but me. It was something I’d said before, and she was understandably tired of hearing it. She said, “You stopped trying.” I looked away, and saw something scurry across the living room floor: a mouse, one of a couple which had claimed our aging home in the last few months. It was not hard to explain. We lived on the edge of a forest on the outskirts of town, and once upon a time we’d taken long walks on the path snaking among the trees. Of course there were mice. There were always mice, and some had made it indoors. But to me, at that moment, this one was not a manifestation of life but a resident of a graveyard, seeking to investigate the smell of something that should have been long since buried. My ability to hide my visceral reaction to the rotting thing she seemed to be failed. My gorge rose and spewed out. I wept that I was sorry, so sorry. I said that if I could explain I would. I said that if anybody could explain, I would.

Later, as she wept upstairs, I opened the silverware drawer and removed a silver tablespoon, placing it at the edge of my right eye and steeling myself for what seemed the only answer. Blinding myself seemed sensible. Her skeletal appearance, to me and me alone, was just a neurological symptom of something gone wrong inside me. I could cure it.

I knew it because of a framed photo that now sat on our mantel, of my wife sitting with her sister’s daughter, then three years old. It was a recent photo and it depicted my wife with skin intact, cradling a little girl who looked just like her, down to the eyes. I had been in the room when the shot was taken and what I’d seen when I looked at her was a skeleton, all bones to the waist, long tanned legs in cutoff shorts below. The skin there was sleek and shiny and intact, not yet touched by the inexorable decay, and the affection shown to the little girl had been a cute display for the visiting in-laws, a sickening image for me. Children, I remember thinking then, echoing the name of an old movie I’d seen, should not play with dead things. I felt sick again, but could not resist the one thing that insisted on my attention: that the issue here remained not her eyes, but my own. Everyone else saw a living, vivacious woman. I could not. The problem was mine.

I did not blind myself. I could not.

I went upstairs.

I apologized.

I behaved.

I summoned the pretense of sanity, by force of will.

What I didn’t do was explain.

How could I explain?

How could anyone explain?

• • • •

We had not made love for a long time. We did not make love for longer still. I could not summon the will to feign arousal. I would have been able to do it had I remained merely no longer in love with her, but I was not the necrophiliac I would have had to be, to make love to what she was in my eyes. It was demented enough to lie beside her, to listen to her soft breathing, to remember that she still had flesh even if in my sight she was daily no more than an articulated skeleton, remnant of beetles.

It happened, though.

Some women exercise an immense will, to get what they want when their men are not forthcoming. My wife had always been one of those. On nights when I was too exhausted, she had many times initiated the act when I was more asleep than awake, urging me to arousal by the force of sheer insistence. She had not done it for a long time, but I had been working extra hard these past months to be kind, to hide my revulsion behind a façade of kindness. She must have gotten to the point where she wanted it enough to hide what had become a façade for her as well, the sweet manner that hid what had become bitterness. She took what I could not give.

For me, it began as a dream. The woman I had fallen in and out of love with returned after all her inexplicable time away. Her lips, which still felt like lips even if the face I saw now no longer seemed to have any, brushed mine. I moaned. They drifted downward to my chest, kissing my nipples, then furthering their journey south until they closed on the head of my penis. It was suddenly no longer night and the light in the room, streaming in through windows we’d raised the open air, was that of a late summer afternoon, complete with the chirping of birds and the distant shouts of the neighbor children. When I was erect she climbed atop me and took me inside. In my dream I once again saw her spectacular blue eyes, challenging me and taking pleasure in her easy conquest of me. I considered myself silly for ever having rejected her. How could I have been such an idiot, to fall out of love with such a creature?

And then came the point where I could not have been expected to continue without coming fully awake, and what rode me was a skeleton again, visible in the dim light and just as dreamlike as the fully living woman had been, just the interval of a dream-synapse ago. I almost gasped in shock instead of pleasure, but if I closed my eyes and concentrated on the sensations of the flesh instead of the sight before my eyes, I felt everything I should have felt: the softness of her mouth, the artistry of her hands, the ticklish brush of her long hair, whenever she leaned down to kiss me again. It had been too long since I’d last felt these things, and I half-expected to see her restored face, her restored skin, when I opened my eyes. But I did not. She still wore the face of the grave, and it was still that which I saw making love to me, even though I could still feel her living skin, her warm hands, her soft lips, which more than ever had not gone away, even if they could no longer be seen.

By my judgment of the moment, our love had never felt this good before I stopped feeling it, when she still had skin, when I could still regard her without horror.

Then, when we were done, she rolled off, and lay that naked skull on her pillow, eyes a pair of bottomless black pits staring at me. Of course I had no evidence that they were open or closed. Maybe she’d fallen back to sleep. Maybe she was wide awake and waiting for me to reward her inviting gaze with some kind of endearment.

“I.” I did not finish the sentence. Love you still seemed far too much. The critical issue was still present, damnable but opaque to argument or resistance.

Then I began another sentence. “I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you,” she said, without venom. “It’s not going to happen again. That was a parting gesture, you son of a bitch. I’ll expect you gone in the morning.”

What could I do but nod? It was better than offering an explanation at this late stage.

She got up and drifted, like a Halloween display on a string, to the bathroom, where I heard her slam the seat down, and the subsequent trickle of piss hitting the water. It was the single most bitter piss I’d ever heard. She hates me, I thought, understanding also that I’d left her no other option. Why would she not hate me? Hating me was the best choice, and it would not be any different at this point if my ability to see her returned, as healthy as it had been in the days when she was the whole universe to me.

She flushed, then said, “Oh,” and switched on the light before returning to bed. She did not lie down or crawl under the blanket. Instead, she sat upright, back straight against her headboard as she examined what she held in her bony hands.

There was a small gray mouse cupped in her palm. Being a mouse, an untamed animal, it should have been as terrified of her living appearance as someone taken by surprise in a dark room might have been of her skull face, but it seemed interested enough, its neck craning to take in the sight, its whiskers twitching as it took in her scent. It was at home with her, this mouse. It seemed to love her.

“Sweet thing,” my wife said. The words were not meant for me at all. I reflected that to all the creatures in the world, except for me, she was a living thing, who bore no façade that reeked of the grave. The failure, I knew again, was mine.

Then it left her palm, used its paws to catch hold of an empty eye socket, and disappeared into the void without meeting any resistance at all.