Inspiration Saturday "The Poet's Husband"

Here is a Flash Fiction written by Molly Giles. It was originally published in: Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories.

Molly Giles 1942-Present

“He sits in the front row, large, a large man with large hands and large ears, dry lips, fresh-cut hair, pink skin, clear eyes that don’t blink, a nice man, calm, that’s the impression he gives, a quiet man who knows how to listen; he is listening now as she sways on the stage in a short black dress and reads one poem about the time she slit her wrists and another poem about a man she still sees and a third poem about a cruel thing he himself said to her six years ago that she never forgot and never understood, and he knows that when she is finished everyone will clap and a few, mostly women, will come up and kiss her, and she will drink far too much wine, far too quickly, and all the way home she will ask, “What did you think, what did you really think?” and he will say, “I think it went very well”—which is, in fact, what he does think—but later that night, when she is asleep, he will lie in their bed and stare at the moon through a spot on the glass that she missed.”


The husband character is aloof and passive. He sees his wife onstage and pushes down his feelings of inadequacies to her own successes  The content of her poems torments his past behavior (shoving words back into his face he had said years ago). She is wildly successful even. Women are the ones that come up to her, in an act of understanding, to tell her how well she did and how much her struggle might inspire them. However, she doesn't have much struggle. She is married to a man that would obviously give her the world if she asked for it. The last line, he is laying in bed, unable to sleep, and starring at the window, the spot, or her short comings; he treats her faults the same way she treats his. He is calm, passive, but it keeps him from sleeping. he focuses all of the emotion that he has for his wife's constant passive complaining to him in her poems, in his own passive way. 

Will this couple ever confront the other about their spouses' shortcomings? Tell me what you think in a comment below.