True Love

Len Kuntz

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For their tenth anniversary, his wife grew a moustache. 

Like a patch of dirt, seeded with grass kernels, it took a while to fill in.

The husband eyed her suspiciously, said, “If you want to disappear, well, then, I guess you should just go already.”

“It’s not that,” his wife replied. “I thought you said we should try shaking things up?”

“I meant lingerie. Nipple clamps. Sex toys. That sort of thing. You know, a little bit of legitimate kink.”

“Now you tell me,” she said, fingering a stubborn, stray whisker near her earlobe. “I’ll shave it off right away.”

“No, wait, maybe it’ll grow on me like it did you,” said the husband, who was scrawny and pale and couldn’t grow a moustache to save his life.

The wife was always playing with it, twisting the ends into waxy wisps until they resembled the curled ends of the Joker’s smile in Batman movies. When concentrating, she stroked the brush of hair equidistant below both nostrils. While snoring in bed, the collective hairs waved like a wheat field in the wind. It was staggering to witness. Intoxicating. Hypnotizing.

In time, the husband grew used to it, the way you do with a small sprocket of broken glass in your car’s windshield.

When they kissed, it was like opening his mouth and sucking on the branch of a spruce tree, working his tongue through wan, scratchy tree limb. But eventually it normalized to a degree, and the faint, spiky ends merely tickled him mischievously, like a secret dying to be spilled.

Very soon, however, their sex life exploded. Pure fission. He wondered if he might be gay, but cancelled that notion after surfing Pornhub, watching frotting videos, and other such dull activities. 

For their eleventh anniversary, his wife grew a logger’s beard. Thick and dense, it brushed against his chest in a sensual, soothing way during missionary. If she took him doggy, with a strap-on, her beard swirled his shoulder blades like a masseuse with a maestro’s touch. 

But her beard caught crumbs during mealtime, and also the striated rays of the sun in early morning, turnined her bottom-face whiskers into a kaleidoscope of wonder and confusion.

It was all so peculiar, so tantalizing. He realized he had never loved her so much, or that he even could love her to this extent. She had sacrificed and sacrificed —dealing with mockery on the bus, in the grocery store, at the gym, the bank, walking the dog, getting gas, buying flowers, raisins, peanuts, everywhere really…

He was a shy romantic, so he tried his hand at poetry, sultry stuff mostly, written in a tiny scroll on origami paper-figurines that he furtively slid between various gaps in the bushes of her cheeks and skin. At night, before they made love, for the second, third, or fourth time, she would pull a poem free, like an ingrown hair or pomegranate, and read it aloud, though whispering as she did so, her body pulsing beneath the blanket like a trapped seal.

The love they made then was astonishing.

On their twelfth anniversary, a child was born. Bald as a basketball, their daughter nevertheless had a faint goatee working across her chin, as well as along the rims of her upper lip. 

Doctor and nurse looked askance at each other. “Oh my,” they said sheepishly, before scuttling away like penguins with pool cues stuck up their asses.

When they’d left the room, the husband slid inside the slim mattress where his wife was breastfeeding. He kissed his wife’s hirsute face as gently as he ever had, then his daughter’s frail field of hair, next to her left cheek and cleft chin.

This is true love, he thought, holding back tears. Yep, this is all of it, right here.  

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Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and the author of five books, in addition to the upcoming story collection, Things I Can’t Even Tell Myself, out from Ravenna Press. You can find more of his writing on his website.

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