Read part 3 of my short story "The Man Who Cuckolded Himself"
After a lengthy hiatus, part 3 of my short story “The Man Who Cuckolded Himself” is now posted at Terror House Magazine.
What follows is an excerpt from part 3. The portion may be read in full here.
When it was time for recess, the children formed a line in obedience to their beloved teacher; then, when the PE instructor came to the door and announced she was ready, my wife dismissed them; excitedly, with some noise and a bit of jostling, they left the classroom and processed down the hallway towards the door leading to the playing fields.
Now she was alone. I crept into the room, and found my feet taking me slowly, stealthily, to the desk where she sat. My wife had her eyes closed, and was rubbing her shoulders, clearly enjoying these few minutes of quiet. I moved ever closer, closer, to the point where my face was practically touching the nape of her neck. Her eyes snapped open, and for a moment she looked alarmed; I backed away and she shouted, “Who’s there?” I said nothing, stood stock still, and she gazed around the room with aroused incredulity. I longed ardently to identify myself, to make myself visible, to render myself manifest to her sight, but I held my drive in check and did and said absolutely nothing for a long moment, merely remaining stationary in a spot roughly two feet away from her.
It suddenly struck me that, in the absence of visibility, I could also possibly represent myself energetically, as it were, in order to broadcast myself in a vibrational manner. I focused my mind with scrupulous acuity toward achieving this end. I moved slightly closer, or rather I thought I had moved closer; in fact, my body hadn’t moved even an inch. And yet, I found that my right arm was now reaching out, and my fingers were running through her lustrous locks.
Part of me felt shocked at my own seeming effrontery, as well as the most unexpected revelation that I could operate a seemingly spiritual, yet also corporeal body while my natural body remained inert. Yet I somehow held those emotions in abeyance, even in the midst of such incredible discoveries. Instead, I focused only on my wife, and saw that in fact she no longer was afraid or apprehensive about this mysterious invisible being in her midst; rather, she seemed to have lapsed into a kind of trance; her breaths began to grow louder and as my spiritual-yet-corporeal hand moved from her hair to her face, where I stroked first one cheek, then the other. Now she sighed, in that telltale manner that I still could recall so many years later, the one she could never seem to restrain, even if she wished to do so, the sigh expressing, in its delicate way, the depths of desire that had seized her. I called it her “telltale sigh,” after Poe’s story about the arousal of untamed passion (albeit in a quite different context), called the “telltale heart.”
As my spiritual yet corporeal hands now moved downwards to her chest, an extraordinary thing happened; I heard her whisper my name.
Read all of part 3 of “The Man Who Cuckolded Himself” here
Read all of part 2 of “The Man Who Cuckolded Himself” here
Read all of part 1 of “The Man Who Cuckolded Himself” here