The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

Extended Warranty

I can’t blame our divorce on what happened to my wife’s cousin at our wedding reception. No one can. He was known to have some issues, is all. It likely had nothing to do with his deployment or the embassy. The car was known to have issues as well. It was a Ford and our family is GM. Obviously, it ran in the family.
Something having to do with faulty exhaust, the engine running and the doors locked. It was February and cold as hell. He’d been drinking since the wedding breakfast.
My wife’s cousin was studying to be a lawyer when he died. You’d think he’d have been smarter than that.
Something I didn’t know about my wife when we met: There are a lot of cousins and they’re very close. Her uncles have cottages side-by-side on a small lake up north.
My wife was upset the whole thing didn’t go the way she’d planned. She blamed her sister. It was, as they say, the beginning of the end.
Something I didn’t know about my wife when we were married: She spent summers at the lake with her cousins. They were very close. The cousin that died had nursed my wife’s first hangover, or so the story goes—my wife doesn’t recall exactly.
We postponed the honeymoon for the funeral. Then cancelled it altogether. We never got to Orlando. Do you know what we missed in Orlando? My wife can tell you.
We lost our down payment, of course, but the travel agent forgave everything else. Sorry for your loss, she said. She meant, it wasn’t anything we’d planned for, exactly. But in those days there was no travel insurance.
My wife took a long time to get over it. First about her sister, the maid of honor, who’d caused such a stink about the music—said it was crappy for dancing and insisted that my wife agree. My wife! who had booked the band! She wasn’t about to agree. So there’s an argument and her sister gets mad goes out to the parking lot to sulk and smoke a joint and the cousin goes after her. Then he falls asleep in his father’s car.
It’s taken a long time for me to think of her as my wife. To call her wife. We were young and didn’t know what family was all about. So the marriage didn’t last ten months.
I drive a Toyota now, which I bought second-hand after my father passed last February, thirty years after our divorce. It’s funny that I still say my wife thirty years later. My ex would be more accurate.

Decree

The Governor ordered everyone to stay inside. She’s the mother of two as well, and after that I heard noises in the wall of our apartment for the first time.
Throughout my childhood I was terrified of two things: mice, and the sounds of sex coming from the next room. It’s like something’s trapped, desperate, injured in some way.
I was never told otherwise, but I swore it would not happen to my kids, if I had any. Nor did I ever catch my parents in the act, actually. My father was still my father at the time.
If you assume that fear was the reason I majored in biology in college but now work for the Secretary of State, you’d likely be correct.
Drastic times, said the Governor, require drastic measures. She said we must be prepared, some of us, to lose our livelihoods, our homes. We must work together.
Did I mention she has two kids of her own? A husband who works from home?
My children, at least, don’t seem concerned. Drastic is not on their spelling list. They stream the Disney Channel with the volume turned up, Mickey’s voice filling every room.
Next thing I know a woman from the bank phones out of the blue. The Drive Thru is still open, she says nasally, as if speaking from behind glass. [I’m sorry—it sounded like thorough.] We’ll do whatever we can, she says. We’re in this together.
Whatever you can? I say, my voice squeaking. Can you solve an algebraic formula? Can you spell formaldehyde? Can you make grilled cheese for their supper? If I remember right, it’s the youngest one’s favorite . . .
That’s when the phone goes dead—like her battery dies or the woman disconnects.
I don’t blame her, truth be told. I must have sounded desperate. I must have sounded like something trapped behind a wall, scratching and gnawing to get out.

PHILLIP STERLING‘s most recent book is Local Congregation: Poems Uncollected 1985-2015, released from Main Street Rag in October 2023. Among his other books are two collections of fiction, In Which Brief Stories Are Told (Wayne State University Press) and Amateur Husbandry (Mayapple), a series of micro-fictions narrated by the domestic partner of a yellow horse. A collection of essays and memoir, Lessons in Geography: The Education of a Michigan Poet, is forthcoming in 2024.

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