Ken Poyner is publishing a fair amount of fiction these days, which, after publishing poetry by the bucket load for 40 years, feels kind of like learning in late middle age that sex does not always have to involve a unicycle:  you enjoy the new configuration, but you still look lovingly now and again at the unicycle preserved in the closet.  He is married to one of the world’s premier raw power lifters, a woman who is currently USAPL 105 pound class National Push/Pull and Dead Lift Champion.  That, and the five rescue cats that expect his attentions, makes for a strange environment in which to live and write.  Right now, he is hoping life has him about just where it wants him.

The Spouse (October 25, 2011. Issue 32.)

It takes two men to deliver the box. When you open the door, they have it cocked at a suggestive angle across the porch steps. One leans threateningly against it, not in any way as if resting, but as though he were making sure the box would not contrarily run away. You step back into the saline dark of your house and wave your arm at the stairs, the stairs with that frugal hairpin landing, and nod, imagining the men should be patiently glad you have only two floors.

Up those shore ripple stairs is not so bad, but that landing wriggles like an eel on a bass line and they tilt the ungainly box on one end and then the other and think about taking down the ornamental and feckless banister, then edge the crate, as though over a fish gutting chute, midway up the next landing, slide the back end around, to let it flop like extra anchor line onto the swell of the steps. You watch them grow tired. They move less like men and more like giant squid lured inelegantly too close to the surface by the tease of the killer whale. They move as though they were fishing with nets.

You have them place the box in a gray open space on your bedroom floor. You have no small bills to offer in recompense, and the men bound back the now calm stairs reluctantly rejuvenated, glad to be done with the box and the topical bend in the stairs. Back out to the truck they swarm without closing your door, no doubt to bemoan only half playfully how cheap you must be, and then decide where in this mud flat of a neighborhood there is a reputable place to trust for lunch.

You take a small flat head screw driver and begin to try to pry open the reluctant box. It looks like the lid has been clamped on with sea worthy three inch nails, one every eight or so inches, as though the lid were expected to shut in its light indefinitely. Why can't a box like this come like a locked cabin trunk: with hinges, and a padlock against a hasp? Something a man with a key can open, not something a man has to work for hours to remove: not something that is a crewman-like labor, leaving him unseaworthy to enjoy the contents of the box.

You go for a bigger screw driver and a more malcontent hammer. Eventually, you borrow an enormous flat head screw driver from a curiously willing neighbor, and find a small but usable hammer. For an hour you are banging the screw driver in, prying up; moving farther along the spine of the box, banging the screw driver in, prying up; moving farther along the spine of the box, banging the screw driver in, prying up; moving farther along the spine of the box, banging the screw driver in, prying up.

When finally you slide the lid off, having to bend one side up and with all your weight drive it high and over into a rattle and a fit of nails cast dangerously points up, the wife inside opens her mermaid's eyes and sits unsteady up. You rummage around her ocean crisp hips for the packing slip, hoping to ensure all the contents supposedly interred in the box truly match the original request, and match what, like merchant vessel potluck, arrived. She sits there barrel fish eyed as you go over each item: one wife, one white teddy, one pair fuzzy slip-on evening slippers, one set of cotton panties, one white cased make up kit with sundry toiletries (no need for specifics, so long as they meet the need). Yes, it is all there. You check her eye color. Yes, hazel. Her kelp cluster hair? Yes, sea urchin brown. Her delicate toenails and fingernails? Yes, painted a sort of happily disquieting seizure ruby.

You help her stand. Her legs are morning fog wobbly from all the time spent in shipping. She sways simply trying to remain vertical, her eyes adjusting to the landlocked room, her feet crackling slowly with experienced balance. She looks at the expectant curiosity of you, and then looks about the outlandish room, recognizes the lid to the box. With one hand on the back of her slumbering knee and the other supporting her at the waist, you slip one salt spray leg over the side of her crate and onto the industrial grade carpet. She hovers there a moment, her aquarium senses sharpening, straddling the side of the box, unsure, swaying a little like a fox readying its haunches for a mistimed lunge at suspecting prey it does not want.

You are breathing as heavily as a fish out of its bric-a-brac tank, and your back is cramping: but you hold onto her, afraid that if you let go she will fall back into the box like so unthinkingly discarded fish entrails, or she will fall forward and splay face first onto the dry carpet, as disjointed as a barrel of sea ration biscuits.

Suddenly like a ray in the shallows, without your prompting, she pulls her other leg out of the box and leans against you for support. You stand straight and lean into her. The two of you struggle against a Sargasso of gravity. Shoulder to shoulder, you consider your surroundings: you, looking about the room as though it were new as well, inspecting all the corners, counting the lamps, regarding the bed sheets folded back, the closet door thoughtlessly left ajar, the Monet copy you purchased at the National Museum of Art mounted on pasteboard above the dresser, the great mural of the everlasting sea that takes one whole wall into its safe keeping.

And then she is walking. Short steps, like a lungfish on a balancing ball: but walking. You lead her towards the head of the bed and with just a small but decisive push set her down on the edge of the mattress, twist her to get her to lay back and settle in.

You wonder if she will talk, if she will ask questions, will tell you about the storms and calms of her journey, of the life in the box. But it is not a part of the package.

You run like the accidental hammerhead around the bed and get in on the other side, the packing list still crumpled in one planking hand, the plastic bag of additional materials wrapped around one tiring finger. On your back, you pull open the bag and slide out the warranty card, the safety instructions, and finally find the operations manual. You start at page one, with all manner of best intentions, the etiquette of the Admiralty, but your impatience is building exponentially. You are finding it hard to read. When you go to turn the pages, it is one of those massive sheets you unfold and the paper gets tangled as though it were a gill net set too loose and spreads onto your chest. You are thinking deep water, irrefutable currents.

Beside you, the new wife says, "My love?"

Putting down the frustrating paper, you turn to your side and say, "Yes?"

Still on her back, hands evidencing a wicked potential, yet folded on her stomach, eyes to the ivory ceiling, a calm boiling on her face like the underside of a long washed stone, she says, "Move love is the death of Sunday's rabbits, the hunger of the chase, dust in dry fur, lightening out of arid horizons, disgust in the cracking of penitent lips, and the powder of children's bones."

And you roll towards her, intending to stop, but you are rolling down a great uncluttered sea shelf, followed by the sound of creatures that would want to be starfish, if they could understand your pearl need, if they understood how the bivalve is pried open and the prized muscle meat drawn out.

The two of you thrash about like a school of a thousand, and your love making is a one man performance: a racer lapping the pool alone, furiously alone, arms and legs shoveling the slyly unnoticed water, spray and wash and splash and gasps of air. Water is water. There is nothing you are incapable of, and your energy leaves lingering light on the floor, the sound of forming thunderheads in the ceiling corners, abandoned salt pools that will be the home of laborious microbes. You rise from the effort like a man out of a body water that has so close to drowned him that he has learned to sort into tastes and genera the disparate desires of water and has willingly grown accustomed to the fluid geometry of its needs.

Then you hear outside a truck pull up. As the new wife lies casually on her side, curiously dry, a vision of waving grass in a fertile soil cast out of the ocean millennia ago, you draw back the finlike window curtain to see the same truck that delivered the new wife this morning backing again into your drive way. It ambles in sideways, the claws of its rear door dropping down as if by a blue crab studying its cornered carrion. You reach over the bed to where the packing list sits and begin to look it over more closely, straying from the details to the preamble, looking in the columns once hidden by the paper folds, focusing away from the specifics of list and onto the illuminating hard minerals of the header.

Oh, no. You see the description at the head of the confusing and disingenuous packing list: this is not the wife; this is the girlfriend.

Out in your driveway, the same two men are pulling another crate from the back of their truck. They shake their shoulders like the whip stingers of rays and slip towards the whirlpool of the truck's roll door. They grumble that two deliveries in one day to a house with crooked stairs and a malicious eel bend at the landing should be outside of the union contract.

The men begin to slide the box across the truck bed to the small of salt. The girlfriend shifts in your bed behind you: crisp and smelling of earth and gaining the strength to crouch, to lunge. She will be feral on flat open plains, a terror to any smallness that runs in dry grass. You look into the briny dark of your wallet for small bills while, nearby, the wife is being sloshed towards the galleon buoys that point a path up the foam specked stairs.