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There is something wrong with my husband.
My husband has always been a reserved man. A cold man. Some would even call him cruel, but I knew better. He just expressed himself differently. He just had to be taught kindness – that was my job.
There is something wrong with my husband.
He has been coming home late these few days. He tries to not wake me, by placing his feet in a specific way on the stairs. But there is that one step, that creaks only when you slowly place your weight on it. That’s how I know he is back.
There is something wrong with my husband.
My husband has been carrying a strange scent with him, recently – sweet but copper. He has always smelled of metal, working around his machines, in a room that he always locks. A room that we are not allowed to enter. A room with a thick door, and even thicker walls.
There is something wrong with my husband.
Nowadays, he has been requesting me to do laundry more often. He told me that it wasn’t frequent enough; that his clothes smelled bad. That I should try doing it manually, instead of throwing them into the washing machine.
I smelled them. All of his work shirts had that sweet scent to them. I thought that it was just the smell of children. After all, they were an inseparable part of his job.
There is something wrong with my husband.
I have been observing him, going in and out of the house, as if in a daze. He has always been a quiet man, but now he doesn’t even talk to me. He blows me off, telling me he has too much work, and goes into another room. I can’t blame him; he has to provide for our family. I can only be patient.
There is something wrong with my husband.
There have been disappearances lately. A few kids have gone missing; they were all over the news. I raised my concerns to my husband – my concerns about our own children’s safety. He didn’t pay attention to me. He only left the room. I should have approached him at a different time.
There is something wrong with my husband.
I have been stressed as of late – because of my husband and his unusual behaviour.
When I found out that I forgot to put away some meat from the previous day’s shopping, I got nervous. It had to have been thrown away; his money had to have been thrown away.
I tried to get rid of it, before he got the chance to see it, but when I opened the package, a familiar scent hit me. The sweet smell. The smell of decay. My husband smelled of decay. His clothes smelled of rot.
There is something wrong with my husband.
Yesterday, when he went to work as usual, I got curious. Why was he keeping us from entering the room? I knew his work was private, but we were family. There aren’t supposed to be secrets in a family, right? I took the key from his desk inside his office, and quickly went downstairs. The steps remained quiet.
There is something wrong with my husband.
What I found in the room... At first, I saw stacks of blueprints – my husband is an engineer. So, why did I find notebooks, where he wrote about “child containment chambers”? Why was there a shirt, stained with crusted blood, tucked under some lawsuit documents? He could have just hurt himself while working. But there was so much of it.
There is something wrong with my husband.
It’s late. Our children are all asleep, and I anxiously wait for my husband to come back. I wait for the stairs to creak.
I will need to apologise for going inside the room. He should be allowed to keep his secrets. I shouldn’t blame him – he has always been a reserved man.
I will apologise in the morning. This won’t be the right time; he doesn’t like to talk when he’s tired.
There is something wrong with my husband.
The step creaks, even quieter than usual. Even through the closed door, I can smell the decay. His decay. And as the door slowly opens, and my husband stands still on the threshold, I realise I will not be able to apologise.
There is something wrong with my husband.
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