I Turn 39 During the Pandemic and My Husband Asks Me to Buy a Gun

By Brianna Pike

while we sit in our kitchen, our son asleep upstairs. Earlier, I sat on our back deck, the sunlight beating bold over the lawn as my son streaked across the newly green grass, falling over & over into its softness. It is my birthday & I did not expect this gift of green yellow and birdsong but I am grateful as my husband comes through the gate carrying tulips & iris & pussy willows bundled in plastic. He went to the store to buy flowers. He went to the store to buy chocolate cake. He went because I asked him to. I didn’t think it a burden, this simple request of cake and flowers to celebrate my body on the brink of a new decade. The only corona I considered were the nodding yellow centers of my daffodils. When I spoke to my therapist later that afternoon, after my husband returned, after I put the flowers in water & the cake in the fridge, I told her I was fine in quarantine. I told her I was fine working from home. I told her I was fine. I am thinking of my therapist & nodding yellow coronas & chocolate cake as my husband braces both hands on the kitchen island & looks to where I sit at the kitchen table in a chair my mother painted, the seat covered in a bright yellow chrysanthemum. Yellow flowers, yellow sun, yellow kitchen cabinets, yellow, yellow everywhere when my husband says: I want a shotgun. I am immediately red, immediately forgetful of flowers & cake & birthdays, but he keeps talking:  first line of defense, it is your choice & I am scared. He repeats consider, consider, consider as if I will not. As if I will not imagine, for days, the shiny barrel of a gun hidden in a box beneath our bed or in our closet. As if I will not imagine someone smashing in our picture window, the window I stood in front of for an entire summer the year our son was born. As if I will not hear feet on the stairs or the rattle of a door knob each night as I try to fall asleep. As if I do not already see this new world every time I open my eyes. As if I do not understand, that it is already here.

Brianna Pike is an Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. Her poems and essays have appeared in So to Speak, Connotation Press, Heron Tree, Memoirs & Mixtapes, Whale Road Review, Utterance & Juxtaprose. She currently serves as an Editorial Assistant for the Indianapolis Review and lives in Indy with her husband and son.

She blogs at briannajaepike.wordpress.com. Find her on Instagram @Bri33081.

Photo credit: Andrew Fogg via a Creative Commons license.