SARA KACHELMAN

THE SHOVEL WIFE

Lo, I am a great mind and I am building a world! I shed the lusty husk of the body to hunt the savage plains of metaphysics, and soon the fecundity of my whiles will be revealed! Can you guess at the daily exertions of a living genius? While my person appears idle in its wingback chair, rest assured that inside my skull a horde of pseudopodia grasps at the farthest reaches of knowledge as if suckling the golden teat!

          But I could not do it alone, no! Behind all great minds is a stable of wives. 

         And I am a sure patron of female efficiency. You can tell by my carriage that I am a gentleman, dozing in my robe of reindeer skins from Lapland, my feet neatly tucked in oxblood slippers. To you, chérie! It amazes me, when I make a habit to observe them, the exactness with which they perform their duties, my angels-in-the-house. 

         The door wife opens.
         The clock wife chimes.
         The tub wife fills.
         The pen wife writes.
         The oven wife bakes.
         The needle wife knits.
         The broom wife sweeps.
         The womb wife conceives.
         The stamp wife licks herself. 

         A man of great merit deserves a happy home where he may rest his head. And I have arranged just that.

         Of course, my comely dependents are not without their maintenance. Even the most simplistic functions are subject to the strains of time. One forgets, when selecting a wife, the regular servicing that threatens one’s intellectual privacy; the tuning, oiling, sharpening, stretching, trimming, mending, straightening, and replacing they require. One finds oneself procuring more wives to soften the stress of it all. After dinner, the spoon wife brims with milk of magnesia. Then comes the cigar wife, the brandy wife, the morphine wife—

         I say, the best wife for your money is the shovel wife, although I have yet to find a proper use for her. All day and all night she’s out in the garden, digging, and I haven’t heard a peep since she arrived. By now she’s dug a trench wide enough to bury half the men in town. I don’t know what to make of it, but it hardly concerns me. She carries on just as well without my supervision. One would think she has a mind of her own.

Sara Kachelman’s work appears in DIAGRAM, Portland Review, and many other journals. She is an incoming MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Contact her at sarakachelman.com.