Cows need salt, did you know?

They know one thing and one thing only.

He knows that she is a screamer. He has seen her teeth marks on the velvet cushions she thought she’d smoothed out after burying her face in them on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. It’s a shame; she’s never been as subtle as she thinks she is. Even now, he hears her footprints forming on the carpets right over his head – trying, and failing, not to stomp. Expensive expansive objects that cannot stand where they stand any longer are moved. Curses are muttered. Curtains are yanked, refusing to part, copper rings screeching on old curtain poles. He smiles, running his thumb over his old lips, his tongue over his old teeth, his mind over his old life. The high-pitched scratch tastes familiar; scared. Yes, there was a time when she sang Ella Fitzgerald, but at some point, the tapestries and family portraits were louder than she’d ever hope to be. He asks her sometimes, to sing, he tries, but it comes out wrong, like he’s mocking her or worse, himself. She’s pushing their bed onto the balcony. It will not fit. That is her point.
It is Thursday.

She knows that he is chained. On phantom legs, he fancies himself roaming room after room like he still knows them, but she knows: nothing looks the way he remembers, including her songs. She found him there, in the basement, unwashed and smiling, leashed to the brick wall with shackles passed down from generation to generation of smiles. His cot is rank. He never moves. He has forgotten how; needed to be still for his brothers. This is where she’d found him, somewhere along the line, eyes lolling, tongue rolling and fantasizing, fantasizing, fantasizing about the whole wide world in rapture when he’d finally take to the stage. She’d traced his shackles and lied; the cuffs fitting her own wrists like a promise. Today, there is only the tray with his silver foods, her own knuckles white as she holds it on the way down to the man, the basement, the lock. If he crumbled, so would this house. If this house crumbled…
One of their boys nods as she steps onto the balcony.

She hands him a cushion.

She knows that he knows it’s Thursday.

“Don’t worry,” they will tell the boys in the summer. “We won’t get a divorce.”

It is meant to be reassuring.

If nothing else is available, a cow will lick a dead carcass for salt.