One Wednesday morning my husband Jerry brushed his teeth and then disappeared. He is still gone. I lay awake in our bed each night, wait for the sound of his keys in the lock, and study his birds. I prefer to keep our bedroom sparse, but Jerry likes whimsy. So I let him line the window sill with these porcelain birds, most of which are white and faceless. Smack dab in the middle of them sits this single brown owl that’s been expertly painted. Its wings are open, its claws are stretched behind a fist-sized body. It watches me with sad eyes when I wake in the morning and before I go to sleep at night. But my husband will return.

When we first married, Jerry wrote me bad poetry and fried spaghetti on a hot plate. He was passionate about grating fresh parmesan. We would lounge on the double bed in our studio and argue about the Iraq war. He was a pacifist and I was not. Still am not.

Later, after our boys were born, we would hire a sitter and walk to this joint downtown called the Duck Inn Bar & Grill. There were ducks everywhere. Wooden mallards lining the bar, duck head handles for the beer taps, and a gigantic sign above the ladies’ restroom that read Duck Girls with an image of a cartoon duck wearing a fuchsia bow around its head. One of the duck’s wings rested on her hip while the other wing rested below her chin as if she was blowing a kiss. Jerry and I got to know the regulars, one of whom was a maudlin 50-something named Cheryl with shaggy blond hair and a long, lean body. Cheryl was always whisper-crying in the bathroom. If one of the guys at the bar wasn’t too drunk to notice, he’d yell Duck Girls! as we walked out of the bathroom together below the sign. Cheryl would turn towards the wall and swipe the mascara from under her eyes with a shaky finger.

Most of the regulars came to the Duck Inn to escape the inevitable boredom of life. They came for conversation, to see something different than the stained beige walls of their ordinary kitchens. Take Cheryl. She spent her days taking care of her frail father. In the mornings, she organized his pills. In the afternoons, she read him the local Phoenix news. And in the evenings, she took a god damn break and drove her rusty pickup to the Duck Inn.

Now that I think about it, Cheryl wasn’t always whisper-crying. Once in a while, Blondie would blast through the speakers and she would dance in circles with her hands in the air, her T-shirt hugging her breasts and waist. One time, Cheryl grabbed the inflatable duck and kissed it long and hard. One way, or another, I’m gonna find ya, I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha, she belted as she smooched that giant plastic thing. My husband stared and stared as she hopped and sang. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Nicole Hart is a lawyer living in Westchester, New York with her husband and two children. Her flash and poetry have been published in Bath Flash Fiction, BULL, Flash Flood, JMWW, The Lumiere Review, and Whale Road Review. You can find her on Twitter @nicolehart_blog.