My Body is a Cage and Other Stories

would imagine she was. If that did happen, what unspeakable emotion made you watch her go,
memorizing the features of her face and hair? Andhow much longer after that incident did you
begin writing Jolene? I would lose a stranger’s facein a matter of hours, but you kept hers for
God knows how long and then tucked it safely in lyricsto be sung to millions across the country.
If your Jolene was anything like mine, I understandwhy you did it, even if I don’t understand
how you did it.
When my husband first began lying about where he wasgoing after work, I let him. I had
no idea what to do. We had only been married a year,these things aren’t supposed to happen
until our forties. After my body changes in the wakeof bearing his children, and we slowly
descend into a silence from which we never truly recover.But I was twenty-four and he was
twenty-six. We weren’t even sick of each other yet.I let him come home with rosy cheeks and
vague answers to my questions, let him kiss me goodbyein the morning, let him make love to
me like it was still love. I imagined the other personcould be his coworker Natalie, but she
always comes to work with cat hair on her sweatersand he’s allergic. Maybe his old college
friend Brandy? But she lives two hours away from hereand he’s never gone long enough for
that. Every time I went to the grocery store and awoman would make eye contact with me and
flash one of those awkward, polite suburbia smilesI would think, are you fucking my husband?
One night he was in the shower had the audacity, ormaybe stupidity, to leave his phone
on the bed. I had walked in from the living room andsaw it light up like a Christmas tree. My
presents? Texts from an unprogrammed number in hisphone asking what he’s doing his
weekend, that whoever was on the other end had funthe other night and wants to see him again.
He hadn’t changed his settings to make text notificationson the lockscreen just say “Text
message” - no, he had the settings where anyone couldpick up his phone and read the message’s