Goodbye, Princess
Christopher Schmitz
Ned briefly looked down from the wheel to use his long, yellowed fingernails to split the pistachio shell. Smiling, he peered over his coke-bottle glasses at his wife; she scowled at him.
“Don’t you look at me like that, pervert.”
“S-sorry,” Ned stuttered, tossing a handful of shells out the window. He couldn’t help it; even though Haroldina had put on more than four hundred pounds these last forty years it just made more of her to love. The mechanics had become more difficult, however, due to Ned’s frail stature as much as Haroldina’s “condition.”
He gulped down a handful of nuts. A couple of them missed his sparsely toothed mouth and lodged into his thick, scraggly beard. Zooming through the Duluth area freeway at a steady forty miles per hour, Ned tilted the bag to offer some pistachios to his beloved.
“Ned! You know I don’t eat salted nuts,” she clutched a half-eaten Double Whopper with both hands. “All that salt is bad for me.” In her revulsion, Haroldina twisted in her seat. “Ow, ouch! Now look what you’ve done, Ned. My fibromyalgia is acting up!”
“Sorry,” Ned repeated. “I didn’t mean ta hurt you.”
“Well ya did!” Haroldina crossed her arms and huffed. “And to think, I was thinking of doing that thing you liked tonight.”
“S-sex?”
“I swear! What is it with you men? It’s never enough that we consummated on our wedding night; you just concentrate on the road. I’m in pain now; there’s no way you’re getting any tonight.”
Ned sighed and looked down to the bay. His daily routine never changed much; truthfully, he felt more like a chauffeur and butler than a husband. Between the weight gain and her fibromyalgia, she couldn’t hardly move without his help anymore. Ned shrugged; at least he had this whole bag of nuts to himself. He cracked a few more shells and ignored the rambling complaints from his wife.
Tossing another nut into his mouth, something caught in his throat. He’d missed a shell and it caught against his uvula. He tried to suppress the gag reflex and cough it out, but couldn’t dislodge it.
Haroldina glared daggers at him. “Are you quite finished?”
Ned smiled at her and nodded. He couldn’t upset his precious. Seconds later, he felt his cheeks flush and his vision got foggier than normal. He shook his head “no.” She wasn’t paying attention any more.
He tried to speak up and tell her he was choking, but couldn’t talk, either. The shell had completely restricted his airway.
Ned picked up his cell phone. Swerving erratically through all three lanes, he scrolled down to an entry titled “Princess” and tried to type a text message to his wife.
Haroldina slapped the phone from his hands; it clattered to the center console. “See why they got this new anti-texting law in this state? You almost killed us, Ned!”
Mustering all his nerve, he glared back at her and sped up an exit ramp. He pulled over near a refinery on the bay side and clambered for his phone. He knew it stunk horribly near the plant but didn’t care; Ned couldn’t smell it because he couldn’t breath. If not the stench, Haroldina would just complain about something else.
He found the entry and furiously hit the keys. Pushing the Send key, Ned got out and walked around to Haroldina’s door and waited for her, his face beginning to purple. He stood there for six seconds while he waited for her phone to chime; she glared at him the entire while.
Taking her time, she methodically dug through her overstuffed handbag and pulled out a pink, jeweled cell phone. She read the message. “‘Give me hemlich?’ Hemlich? I don’t know what kind of crazy stuff you’ve been lookin at on the YouTube, Ned, but I ain’t into that, especially in public!”
His vision crowded with tunnel vision. Wiping a tear from below his thick glasses, Ned typed one more message and clicked send.
The pink phone chimed again. Haroldina read the screen as Ned slumped against the car and slid down to the pavement, his chest fluttering as his lungs panicked.
“‘I lovv you?’ You know what, Ned? You’re a terrible speller!” She slapped her window. “Get up. I’m gonna miss my soaps. You don’t want to see me angry!”
Haroldina peered out her window. “Come on, Ned. Get up. You know I can’t go anywhere without you.”
Ned smiled, exposing a toothless grin with gums blackened from years of chewing tobacco. He tipped over; everything became shaded in tones of surreality.
“Ned? Neddy?”
Haroldina carefully wrapped the remnants of her sandwich in its wrapper and set it down on the dashboard. “C’mon Ned. I ‘lovv’ you too. Now get off the ground.”
His sight fully black now, if he had breath to laugh he would have. Ned suddenly realized that he was just as happy right now as he ever had been in his entire life. He wavered for only a moment, but decided if he had to choose to do it all over again, he wouldn’t change a thing.
In the last flash of life, he imagined himself texting one more message to Haroldina. “Goodbye, Prncess.” And he would spell it wrong on purpose.
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