The Suit
Lindsay Fowler Harold’s wife had read too many news reports about home invasions. She told him that older women were particularly susceptible, that their frailty made them desirable targets. That was why, Harold’s wife said, she had ordered the suit for protection. The suit was a metallic, full-body compression suit, a wearable personal security system that would sound an alarm if any breathing, heat-emitting life form infiltrated a two-foot radius. Still, it perplexed Harold that his wife had even purchased the suit. Harold watched his wife try on the suit in front of their dresser mirror. She forced her legs through constrictive openings and stretched the fabric over her hips. “Would anyone really attack you if I’m around?” Harold asked. His wife paused, panting, her left arm half-sheathed in its sleeve. She looked at Harold, and in that glance he felt her take in and dismiss his flabby muscles, age-spotted skin, and stiff joints. “Please,” she said. “What good could you do? You can’t even hear yourself without your hearing aids. I’d be dead before you could even wake up.” Harold’s wife pulled on the suit’s hood and zipped up the protective neck guard and climbed into bed, where she activated the suit’s alarm. This meant no touching: no stroking of the hair, no caressing the waist or hand-holding. Harold’s wife curled up on the far edge of the bed and he watched her back from a safe distance. His wife drifted off right away, but Harold found he couldn’t sleep. The suit reflected the streetlights outside their bedroom window. The fabric seemed to gleam in the dark, almost like a beacon, a lighthouse, beckoning to him. He couldn’t imagine how any such suit would be much of a deterrent. Harold imagined he could inch closer to his wife as she slept. He pretended he could spoon her, press into her soft back, and kiss her shoulder. As he caressed the air around her body, he had one of his increasingly elusive erections. The bulge in his boxers crept outward, penetrating by a hair the safety bubble surrounding his wife. The suit erupted into shrieking alarms; his wife sat up with a gasp, clutching her chest, eyes wild, before she noticed the sheepish look on her husband’s face. The phone rang; it was the security company calling to make sure everything was alright. Harold’s wife made him explain why they needed the alarm disabled. After that, Harold and his wife returned to bed, where Harold’s wife went to sleep with a pillow between them. But Harold found he was more awake than ever. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling above his head. If he ever had an erection again, he wondered, would the suit be able to sense the danger pressing through the pillow barrier? He liked to think that, if he had just woken her and asked, his wife might have allowed him to touch her. Harold ran his hand along the edge of the pillow barrier. Some small part of him hoped that the suit would feel the change in pressure, detecting the pressing threat of intimacy in the vicinity. If he managed to set the alarm off again, this time he would pretend that he, too, had been startled awake. His wife would turn to him for protection and comfort, not realizing that he was once again the culprit. He would pretend to be annoyed; he would suggest that the suit was defective and she should return it. Or perhaps he could convince her to peel the suit off, just for a few hours, so that they could calm themselves after so many “false alarms.” That way, he could at least reach out and run a finger down her spine as they drifted off to sleep. Harold kneaded the pillow a bit more firmly, picturing the bright suit discarded on the floor. And then, in the dark, he would hold her and protect her from the threat of himself. |
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About the Author:
Lindsay Fowler holds her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and her flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Weirderary, The Golden Key, and Work Literary Magazine. Lindsay reads for Typehouse Literary Magazine and cultivates her love of all things weird here. See what else she’s up to here.
Lindsay Fowler holds her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and her flash fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Weirderary, The Golden Key, and Work Literary Magazine. Lindsay reads for Typehouse Literary Magazine and cultivates her love of all things weird here. See what else she’s up to here.