I walked to the edge of a cliff admiring the surging ocean and the jagged rocks below. My wife Janice was walking behind me. I heard her steps quicken. I turned in time to dodge her running attempt to push me off the cliff, but not in time to save her as she plunged off the cliff, her arms waving aimlessly like a wounded bird no longer able to fly. She screamed like a long winded banshee on the way down before her body shattered on the jagged rocks below.
It may surprise you that I wasn’t heartbroken at the loss of her life. We’d been having marital problems for some time, and I read in Janice’s diary that she wanted to kill me. I didn’t tell her I’d peeked into her private diary and learned she wanted to kill me. But I was cautious around her, especially in the kitchen where we had a collection of paring and carving knives. When she was at work, I meticulously checked her belongings for any signs of poisons that she may have hidden to poison me to death with. I’d seen on crime shows that women often used poison to get rid of their husbands, so I wasn’t ruling out that dreadful possibility.
I called the police to report the accident. At first, they suspected I pushed Janice off the cliff and called me a person of interest. But they lacked sufficient evidence to tie me to her death. I attended her funeral and her burial playing the part of a grieving husband, but I felt no sorrow for her. After all, she tried to kill me and we hadn’t gotten along well. I guess we stayed together out of habit, a bad habit. We hadn’t had sex in years. I found that in other women without Janice knowing about it. She suspected I was unfaithful and told me she didn’t care because she had fun too. That was about a month before her death, and I’d thought about divorcing her. But I couldn’t bring myself to taking that irrevocable step. Maybe somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I still felt the marriage could be salvaged, crazy as that may seem.
I made the mistake of having an insurance policy for a lot of money which made me worth more dead than alive. I have no doubt Janice had that on her mind when she wrote she wanted to kill me in her diary. Her life insurance policy was a pittance compared to mine, but at least it covered her funeral and burial expenses.
A few weeks after Janice died, I began dating or re-dating Ginger, a woman I had had a few dalliances with while married. She broke things off with me back then. She had gotten a conscience about, in her words, “Sneaking around with a married man.” I tried to persuade Ginger that I would eventually get divorced from Janice but she asked me to do it asap. I couldn’t, and I’m not sure why. So Ginger tearfully bid me goodbye and that was that until Janice died and Ginger felt she could start up our romance with a clear conscience.
At first, our romance felt like the stuff soulmates are made of. I wanted to spend every minute of every day with Ginger. Being away from her was like being thrown out of heaven. When we finally got to make love at my home, an invisible cracking whip began lashing us, and we both had welts on our bodies. At that moment, I heard Janice’s voice inside my head. She said, “Get that bitch out of our bed and our home, you cheating bastard!”
Scared and not knowing what else a disembodied Janice was capable of, I whisked Ginger out of my house and into my car to get her away from Janice. I was so frightened I could barely drive. I told Ginger about Janice talking to me in my head and what she said.
When we reached Ginger’s apartment, she got out of my car and said, “I’ll never set foot in that house again.” She slammed her apartment door without even giving me the usual goodnight kiss.
A day later she called me at work and said, “I can’t deal with this. It’s like you’re still married. We’re done.”
Strange as this may sound, I’m back with Janice. I know. You are wondering how I could get back with a dead wife. Being dead eventually mellowed her out and made her a nicer person, almost saintly. I feel her loving presence every day and hear her endearing words in my head. At night her spirit is next to me in bed, and I feel her caresses instead of the painful, invisible whip she punished me and Ginger with. We’ve realized we’re soulmates that even death cannot separate. I know when I die we’ll be together in the afterlife, and like in the fairy tales, we’ll be in love happily ever after.
Bob Boyd