I wrote tenderness on a sticky note and stuck it on my computer monitor. The next person who wandered by my cubicle, I tried to hug. Their arms flailed like ribbons. I was fired.
So that wasn’t it.
At home, I made a cake, and my wife made a list: sugar, fat, calories, carbohydrates, and, again, sugar. I ate it alone in a shaft of sunlight. To the sunlight I said, “Teach me.” It burned a perfect angle of red skin on my cheek.
“What will you do?” my wife spoke into the dark.
We were in bed, and no one had touched no one.
“I will work again,” my mouth said, but not me.
“Good,” my wife said. “We just bought that car after all, and there’s this purse I’ve been eyeing—”
“I used to draw as a child,” I told her.
“Yes, you’ve said.”
“I was very good.”
She deflated the room with her sigh. In the morning, though, the room was not empty, and neither was I.
That day, I hugged all the life that could not resist me. Dogs, cats, trees, grass, flowers. To hug a flower, lightly press a sunburned cheek to its petal.
When my wife came home, she said, “You’re still in your robe.”
“Hold me.” I don’t think I’d ever asked.
She laughed and put me in charge of dinner.
“Potatoes were once alive,” I told her over the music of our forks.
She was the bass clarinet when she said, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I got a job,” I lied.
She transformed back into an ambitious girl. “That’s better.”
Out under the stars, middle of the night, the moon wet my eyelashes.
“Hey,” a smoky voice said from the other side of the fence.
“Hey,” I said.
“Look here.” There was a knock near a penny-sized hole in the fence.
I did as I was told. “The Moon,” I said, “helps.”
“Right?”
“But no thank you.”
“Oh, no,” the man said with a chuckle. “I only wanted to show you.”
I felt sick.
Inside, my wife was uncovered and had rolled into the center of the bed.
The next day, after she left for work, I got in my car and drove. I touched my own cheek. I ran fingers through my own hair. I took the car out into the hills, sped up the inclines to feel my belly squeeze itself when the car crested and fell. I could go on like this forever, I thought. Excited by the prospect, I took a hill even faster and came upon stopped traffic.
I did not die.
Instead, for months, the nurses called parts of me tender. This is tender and that is tender and your poor tender bones.
“You’re a steak,” my wife joked, her new purse like a sleeping child in her lap.
“Meat,” I said with no teeth, so it just sounded like me.