Celeste

Celeste: 353 WC

The knuckles on Celeste’s fingers were larger than the mouth of the aspirin bottle, so she had to use tweezers to get the cotton out. She poured all the pills into the toilet, stuffed the empty plastic bottle into her mouth and ground it flat with her teeth. She swallowed the bottle, then removed two additional bottles from the medicine cabinet and followed the same procedure.

Finally she came to bed, naked and ready. Celeste smiled, showing her steel teeth. She set her left hand with its enormous knuckles on my chest and said, “My headache’s gone away.”

So we did it, and afterward I turned out the light and laid on top of the covers feeling guilty. Celeste had not wanted to have sex, but I had insisted.

In the morning she couldn’t get out of bed. Her forehead was as hot as an orange skillet. Every inch of her body quivered, and during the night her already large knuckles had swollen to the size of golf balls.

I went into the bathroom and soaked a small towel with cold water. The wet towel hissed when I ran it over Celeste’s burning skin.

I picked up the phone and dialed 911. It tore me up watching the paramedics work over my wife’s naked body. She was so self-conscious that if she’d had a drop of awareness, she would have wept in shame at having her body exposed.

They loaded her onto a gurney, wheeled her out to the ambulance and rushed her to the hospital. At 11:42 in the morning Celeste was pronounced dead.

A couple months after the funeral a friend encouraged me to join a singles club. At the club gatherings I met dozens of big-knuckled, steel-teethed women. All of them as self-conscious about their flaws as my deceased wife had been. While each of these subsequent relationships resulted in satisfying sex, I soon came to realize how special a woman Celeste was.

As ashamed as she was of her steel teeth and overlarge knuckles, Celeste never denied me the pleasure of making love to her with the lights on.