Here’s the thing: I never did manage to get divorced, but my husband was never my Prince Charming. Till death do us part was the vow we made, and death just so happened to part us prematurely, meaning slightly earlier than Neil might have liked. I’m not making excuses, I’m really not, but let’s just face it: Neil was never long for this this world. We didn’t have what you would call a troubled marriage—no drugs or cheating or gambling or battery—but, for the record, let me go ahead and state that being married to that man was no goddamn fairy tale.
Neil peddled insurance and I kept house, but he thought I spent my days eating cream puffs and bonbons and watching soap operas on TV. Which sounds sounds lovely and all, except for one precious hiccup: Roads to Rome airs just once daily, and I never watched any other daytime trash. I started watching with Mother before I even had tits—sorry, breasts—and I never missed an episode until…well, I’m getting to it, aren’t I? Mother got cancer and died eventually, but through all of that I never missed a single broadcast—not even on the day of her dying breath.
Roads to Rome’s theme music had just finished playing—don’t tell me that you don’t know the iconic tune—when death began to rattle at the back of Mother’s throat. I called Neil with the news during a commercial break and he showed up shortly after the cliffhanger, tie loosened and teary-eyed, as if he’d spent the day hanging by that scrawny neck. Poor Mother, she would never know if Alfonso was really dead (of course he wasn’t). Alfonso was still married to Brooke Lexington then, and Brooke was always my favorite. Brooke divorced Alfonso when she found him cheating with Angelique, and then she met Daniel, without a dollar to his name, and they married for love—but only because she could afford to. I never married for money, and I would have gotten zilch had I simply left. You could say I would have divorced for love, had it ever come to that, but you don’t up and end a marriage at the drop of a hat, as Mother always said.
No, my marriage to Neil would come to an end only when I shot him dead with a pistol he’d inherited from his father but was too pusillanimous—a real hundred-dollar word—ever to touch. Not exactly a cliffhanger, is it? When I’m wearing a jumpsuit as I’m saying all this. No Who Shot Neil? or Is Neil Dead?—not worth the t-shirt. My reason for killing him? I won’t keep you in suspense. Getting rid of our TV was Neil’s fatal mistake, but he should have known better. I was never the same after Mother’s death, and according to Neil I was more useless than usual.
One woman, a real chatterbox, came up to me last week, and said I look just like Brooke Lexington. I get that quite a lot, if you can believe it. Brooke got thrown in that jail in Thailand, but she escaped, remember? Only to find out that Alfonso was dead (really dead—for a few years, at least), having died in that plane crash in the Andes. There is little hope of Neil’s sudden resurrection, and unlike Brooke I have no evil twin who’ll conveniently turn out to have done it.
Jean-Luke Swanepoel was born in South Africa, and he currently lives in California with his husband. His work has most recently appeared in Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Columbia Journal, and Maudlin House, with pieces forthcoming in Centaur and failbetter. His sophomore novel, The Book of David, was published in January 2025. Find him on Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/jlswanepoel.