Satellite

  Fred had gotten into the bad habit of calling his wife, Celia - his high school sweetheart, soul-mate, lover, mother of his two children - "Mama". It had begun when his kids began to walk and talk and, despite the subtle sideways looks and quiet but firm rebukes, he continued. It wasn't to needle her - he never intentionally antagonized her except in affectionate, kidding ways - but it was a reference that seemed inevitable somehow, like some comfortable gravity well that his words fell into.
  Downstairs in their respective bedrooms, Sean and Sarah slept with windows open to let the cool spring breezes flow through the house. The curtains in the window to Fred's right swayed in the breeze like lazy ghosts and Celia shudder with chill in her sleep. He pulled the stray blanket over her and she snuggled into it. Something squeezed in his heart for her, something that felt both lost and achingly present. He looked at her form under the covers and he loved her in a way that he didn't have words for.
  "My bottom's too big," she occasionally said when they were alone in their room, dressing or undressing, waking up or going to sleep. She said it in off-handed conversational tones, in the stream-of-conscious externalized thought of the married.
  Fred, with the discomfort of the inarticulate, each time she said it, responded badly, or not at all, which was another form of responding badly and he fretted that there was a woman-wife code that he would never crack.
  "It's not too big for me," was a line he had tried a couple years ago which was met by a look and silence. They did not make love that night, and he sensed that he had done something wrong, but he didn't know what it was.
  Several months ago, he responded with, "Too big for what?" Phrasing aside, he followed up with a hug and a kiss. That night, they did make love. He was happy that they had made love, he was happy that he had done something right, but he still had no idea what it was that he had done right that he had done wrong to that point.
  "Boys are so stupid," Sarah had announced over dinner somewhere in the not too distant past. In a generally quiet family, Sara, whose communication needs approached something nearer to the national average than her parents or brother, commented over the dinner table, sometimes to just break up the silence. Sean, two years younger, slim, and painfully shy, stared down into his plate as she explained why.
  Sara liked a boy in her class and he was too dense to see it. She enumerated a list of his sins including his failure to pick up on the fact that when she passed out papers for the teacher to her classmates, she always did him last. Celia listened patiently while eating her peas and mashed potatoes and offering Sara suggestions and motherly suggestions and affirmations.
  "What do you think, Daddy?" Sara asked him.
  Fred glanced up at Celia for support, but her eyes were on her plate. "I'd say do what Mama says. She knows all kinds of things."
  Sara seemed dissatisfied with this and paused for emphasis, but then continued with another conversational tack concerning two of her school friends and what they had said and done.
  Sean never took his eyes off his plate and looked sad deep down inside as he usually did.
  Boys are stupid.
  Fred wasn't sure why, of all the hundreds, thousands of dinner-time conversations, he was thinking of that one. But, as his children slept downstairs, the breezes swept through his house, and the quiet mystery slept beside him, he was remembering it, and in the uncomplicated but deep fathoms of the man, something enormous creaked under the weight of something unbearable.
  It was at that moment, as Fred was reaching out to touch Celia's warm body, that he heard what sounded like a quick but violent hailstorm hitting the shed in the back yard. He half sat up to listen to the silence, then got out of bed seconds later when he heard it again. Pushing back the swaying curtains, he looked down into the yard, squinting to see in the half-moonlight. The tree beside the shed casted down mottled shadows, but it looked to Fred like the roof was full of holes.
  Moments later, Fred had a robe around him, slippers on his feet and a shotgun in his hand. He exited the house as quietly as he could through the side door and walked toward the back yard. Besides the sound of the breeze blowing through the leaves, he heard nothing. The shed, from ground level, looked normal and sat silently under the moonshade of the tree.
  Fred moved to the shed door cautiously and unlocked the door. Before he turned the light on inside, he saw a new constellation of light coming through the holes in the roof. And he saw on the floor what looked like scattered coals glowing orange. He switch the light on and saw a collection of broken machinery bits and hot wires burning dark spots on the plywood floor. He set his gun against the wall and bent down to look at the debris.
  There were eight or nine pieces, mangled and charred beyond identification, and smelled like the hot metal that it was.
  Fred picked up a pair of hedging shears out of a plastic utility bucket to poke at the pieces and bent his face a bit closer when he heard a high pitched scream above him. He looked up, and saw, as if in slow motion, a large, new hole open in the roof that tore the light out and tore his consciousness from him.

  For the next several days, the Bentonville Herald, as well as national television networks, ran the story of the broken Russian satellite that broke up and fell in Fred Johnsen's back yard. For the next several weeks, Fred recovered in the Bentonville General Hospital from a mangled right ear and broken right shoulder. And for the next several months, Fred came to grips with what had happened to him as a result.

  It happened first, to the best of his recollection, when he was drifted either in or out of consciousness in the hospital. The kids were there for awhile, then had left with someone, and Celia sat with him for awhile. It was dark outside, he thought, and after she announced that she would be going and kissed his cheek, she paused a moment, then touched his hand.
  That night, the Satellite Night, before he had heard the sounds of space junk hitting the roof of his shed, Fred, simple but strong, felt the aching gap between what he had and what he wanted. That frozen moment, condensed and contracted by trauma and drugs, as his hand stretched out in the space between he and his wife, throbbed like a cavity and worked in him like a pivot.
  It felt like treasure simultaneously lost and found, and in the touch of their hands, Celia saw it, felt it too.
  She stepped back with a look on her face that was a mixture of fear, surprise, happiness. She felt guilty of a crime they had not known but had been violating. She felt a joy that was strong as wine and fierce as pain.
  Fred drifted back to sleep after he watched her walk out and dreamed of her body. She twisted and arched like a dancer in his arms. The warm and soft of her skin, the salt-sweet of her taste, the pleasure-pain of her groans, the yielding-grasping of her soul as desperate for him as he was for her.
  He had never had an erotic dream about his wife before. Actually, had never had any erotic dreams at all and the effect was not simply physical arousal, but something in his guts, his heart, his soul, had woken up and had caught on fire.

  The next morning, the nurse noticed that his vitals were much stronger and told him that he would be going home soon.

  Several weeks later, Fred made it downstairs for dinner. Sara was quieter than usual but did relate that the boy who was stupid had said that he liked her. Sean was quiet like usual but had something more solid and substantial behind his silence, something like a dawning or awakening instead of a broken sadness. Occasionally, he stole silent glances at his father.
  As did his mother.
  Celia's eyes met Fred's a few times during that first dinner since the satellite and the edge of her mouth twitched a bit as she tried to suppress a smile. She didn't, however, suppress the slight blush that appeared on her cheek.

  After dinner, as the kids were doing homework in there rooms, Celia hummed a tune and danced just a bit as she washed the dishes. Fred watched her sway as he leaned for a moment in the kitchen doorway. Fred walked up quietly behind Celia and gently pinched her bottom.  She turned partially, caught in his arms, swatted him playfully and giggled. Fred whispered in her ear and she closed her eyes in pleasure.
  Above them, mounted on the burned plywood flooring of the shed, was a small piece of satellite, hidden away from the authorities during the investigation. It had long since cooled since the fiery hell of re-entry, but when the lights were off in the night, and if you looked at it just right, it still glowed just a little.