Marcy, my wife, is quiet. She rarely smiles. Days go by with no contact at all. Still, I have trouble imagining that she is truly unhappy. When she cries, it seems less about emotion and more like drainage. For years we talked about having children. But things were always happening. The phone would ring, for example. Or the commercials would end. Or suddenly one of us would become hungry, and so the conversation would pause. At some point we stopped talking about it. We decided, I think, to just see what happened, which is to say we quit with the usual precautions. What happened was we continued to not have any children.
A little bit about Daniel O'Malley
Daniel J. O'Malley is an American writer whose fiction has appeared in Granta, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, and other publications. His story "Bridge" was included in 2016's Best American Short Stories anthology and broadcast on the NPR program Selected Shorts. He grew up in Missouri and currently lives in West Virginia with his wife, the poet Mary Beth Ferda, and their two children. He teaches in the English Department at Marshall University.