Faustus Hood

Roland Leach

He was only five months into the marriage when he realized this was not how he imagined it would be.

He was in love with Sisely and believed this love was returned equally, yet something had slowly changed, day by day, in those one hundred and fifty days. His wife was slowly transforming into a different person. Quite literally. Just the other morning he had looked across the pillow at her and her face seemed to have changed. Her nose that had a tiny bump near the bridge was straight, the three freckles on her cheek had darkened and looked larger. He quickly reached across the pillow to look at her closely, making Sisely jump but she had already metamorphosized back into the woman he had married.

There were many things that were the same. They still were having sex, still had things to talk about, liked being at home – just the two of them. But Gregory felt that an encroaching tide would soon draw back and expose some other Sisely that he hadn’t noticed before.

The best thing about her face was her eyes; almond eyes whose lids darkened on the corners like the paintings of women favoured by the Renaissance artists. He still remembered the first time he met her on the beach. She was just standing on the edge of water when he came out of the ocean, and she had stared at him and said You looked like you were having fun.

He noticed her eyes.

And that was one thing that had changed. She had always looked into his eyes. He thought it was a game at first and had stared back, thinking he had to outstare her. But she never seemed to look into his eyes anymore. It was like she was looking just to the left of him as if he had a parrot on his shoulder that she was addressing. He may have been imagining it, but there was something sad in her face now, as though life no longer offered anything new. Perhaps this is what happened in marriage.

He was disappointed.

If he had noted some great sadness in her face, had she noticed his disappointment? Were they now a sadly disappointed couple? What had living in the same house together, bound by certificates of forever, done to them?

Perhaps they needed children. They had never broached the subject, they had other careers to fulfil their lives.

They were successful enough to soon have an architecturally designed home in a beach suburb and they could afford most things that others aspired. There would be holidays and dinner parties and if there were children they would go to elite private schools where they could meet other elite children.

They were meant to be happy and perhaps they could be – it might be a phase, the shock of the gnu, a joke Sisely once made. But no matter what they may manage to resurrect there would never be that moment when he came out of the water and she had stared straight at him as if they were alone, stranded on an island at the edge of the world, saying you look like you were having fun.

It was not long after that Gregory woke one morning and heard Sisely in the kitchen. She was making breakfast and he thought, so it will be like this from now on, and was not deeply disappointed. When she came to say it was time to get up, he couldn’t recognize the woman at the door, and she stared slightly to the left, refusing to admit that he also was unrecognisable.