"Hi, Honey" by Kellan Standley

Hi, Honey 

by Kellan Standley 

Half past six on a Monday evening, a woman walks into my home. I startle as the door opens. 

“Hi honey,” she says, ignoring my expression as she walks past my recliner. On her way to the kitchen, she passes by the framed picture on the floating wall shelf, the one showing me standing next to a woman in a pure white dress—a woman who has the same face as the one who just surprised me in my house. 

“How was work?” she asks, rounding the partial wall dividing the two rooms. I don’t answer. 

She rifles through the refrigerator. 

I hear her call out from the other side of the divider, “Do you care if I have what’s left of the rigatoni?” 

She doesn’t wait for a response. 

The vocal silence is filled with the sound of cabinets opening and closing, drawers sliding out and then back, glass against marble, metal scraping against glass, the slam of the microwave door, the beeping as its buttons are pressed, the metallic hum as it re-heats the spinning dish. 

Before long, there’s another series of beeps, rhythmic this time, signaling the plate is ready. 

The woman opens the door once again, sitting down with her meal. 

She doesn’t speak, oblivious to my stares as she fills her mouth with steaming bites of gummy pasta. 

I don’t speak, unsure of what to say, or do, or even think. 

The woman in my dining room is not my wife. She looks like my wife, bearing a visage and figure so identical that even someone who knows her intimately—a coworker, a parent, even her husband—would not be able to distinguish the two. 

I don’t know who the stranger at my table in my house is. But I am absolutely certain this woman is not my wife. 

I know this, because my wife, the real one, is buried in a remote section of the Ocalesca National Forest. Her body is wrapped in black poly sheeting, decomposing under several feet of dirt, nearly two miles from the nearest maintained trail. 

This is not the same woman, because this woman’s face still has the beautiful, finely-sculpted features of the bride in our portrait. My actual wife’s face is caved in to the point that no one could recognize her as the same person in the wedding photo. 

I am sure that the woman eating the last of my lasagna is not my wife, because I bashed my wife’s skull in and disposed of her body last Friday. 

Now, there is someone, or something, taking my wife’s form, taking her place in my life. I don’t know why this entity is here. 

I don’t know what it wants. 

But I’m trapped in here with it.

I cannot seek help. I can never tell anyone. 

Because I am the only one who knows this thing is not my wife. And I am the only one who can ever know. 

I sit now trapped in a prison constructed of my own choices. With her here, I’ve never felt more alone.