My Wife the Space Monster

I brutally murdered my wife on Main Street in broad daylight with a 12-gauge shotgun.

And frankly, I don't see what all the fuss is about.

Of course, I very much doubt I'll be acquitted on that sort of introduction in my upcoming trial, which will most likely result in my execution given the state I live in. It seems unlikely that any defense I offer will be useful in preserving my existence, though with a little bit of luck I may be able to prolong my time on death row for a decade or more, like most wife-killers out there have before. But with what I'm about to tell the world, I hope that at least the people off the jury will understand and pardon me in their minds.

At the very least, a few of you readers will be entertained.

***

It all started last summer, on a particularly hot day at the tail end of July, when my wife Victoria, twin sons Humbert and Jeffrey, and little daughter Katy had all gone out for ice cream cones and were on our way home. Up until this point, our marriage had been happy, smooth, and mostly free of bizarre experiences involving alien life forms. We were making our way back to our house in the best part of our little town, chatting and periodically threatening the kids when they got out of hand. I was having a grand old time.

We were nearly back at our house when I noticed my beloved wife mumbling something, her head cocked to the right and her mouth held up to the shoulder of her blouse. For a minute or so she kept mumbling incoherently, or what I perceived as incoherently, and then she abruptly stopped, looked forward again, and said,

"I think the Caprice needs an oil change."

"Uh..." I was dumbfounded for about three seconds, until I shook my head to shirk off the confusion. "Yeah, yeah it does. I think I'll get on that."

"Is something wrong, honey?"

"No." I decided that was the truth; Victoria had a lot of little quirks; everything from snorting at random to naming one of her sons Humbert. I put it out of my mind—the lady was an artist, after all, so she had to be a little crazy.

But, for whatever reason, that was one quirk I just couldn't put out of my mind. I hadn't see her do anything like that since three days after I proposed to her, when I caught her seemingly talking to her own breasts in an equally incomprehensible tongue. That had been nearly eleven years earlier, and I had forgotten until that July afternoon. By the time I had tucked the kids in and gone to bed, her muttering was all I could put my mind to and I worried it would drive me insane if I didn't say something about it.

So, around eleven thirty, on a night where Victoria went to bed earlier than usual and the stars were out in all their distant glory, I decided it was time to interrogate. She stepped into the room and I sat in the darkness, sitting straight up and staring at her as she switched into her pajamas and shed her jewelry. She was just about to slip under our decorative comforter when I spoke up, causing her to nearly jump out of her skin.

"Vicky?" Said I.

"Oh! Oh my God, Ben, you scared the crap out of me."

"Sorry. Listen, do you remember talking to yourself on our walk earlier?"

"What?"

"Y'know, that part where you talked straight into your—"

"I have no idea what you're talking about." She said very quickly. "Half a second, I just remembered I have to go to the bathroom." She zipped out of the bedroom, entirely ignoring our full-sized washroom by the door.

Once again I was dumbfounded. Not so much by her actions but by how ludicrously, comically suspicious she was acting when, normally, she would only have to exercise the tiniest bit of stealth and I would be utterly oblivious to what it was she wanted to hide. Our daughter was borne out of her convincing me I was so sexy that she couldn't resist me, when that morning I had adamantly declared that I wanted no more children. This was more than unusual—it was ridiculous.

I waited a half an hour for her to return, and she didn't. With a heavy sigh, I slipped out of the bed and followed her path, stepping lightly in the gray bunny slippers she had bought me two Christmases ago. Looking everywhere—all the bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, livingroom, basement, furnace room, and the storage closet that housed nothing other than our liquor cabinet—I found nothing but a bit of cat puke on the foyer rug.

I would have gone back to bed, if it hadn't been for the sudden, gently undulating green glow of something from the kitchen. I turned away from that puddle of feline vomit and slowly tiptoed my way towards the light, confused, sleepy, and on the verge of piddling myself. As it happened, the glow emanated from outside, and when I worked up the urge to look over my counter and gaze into my backyard, I saw the rather mortifying sight of an eight-foot-tall, tentacled, gray-skinned monster with dozens of inky black eyes standing before my wife. It had emerged, it seemed, from a long, narrow vessel of some kind that floated just above the ground, composed of some kind of grainy, rock-like material. From each porthole and its entrance came the light.

And there was my wife Vicky, talking in that same mutated tongue to the monster. I backed away in horror, my mouth agape and my mind racing.

Minutes later the glow disappeared—I suppose the space ship flew off—and she entered through the back door and stared at my cringing, gawking form. She stared into my eyes, surmounted the steps, and advanced on me, covering a distance of ten feet in a tenth of a second. Her eyes were black, her fingers had become tendrils, and she stared into me.

"This is only a dream, dear. Only a terrible, terrible dream. It will go away now." Her tentacles shot up and ran through my mouth, up my sinuses and into my skull. I blacked out instantly.

***

When I came to, it was morning and I was back in my bed. Vicky was just emerging from the shower, and after rationality took hold and I concluded it had been a dream, I fired off in a dazed rambling the REM horrors. She listened intently, as she often did, comforted me a little, and then started cracking jokes about it until I was howling with laughter as she was. Indeed, that would have been the end of it, if only I hadn't broken into a nosebleed then, and again in the afternoon, and three times throughout the coming night, when I hadn't had one since being a teen.

Of course, I was still fairly certain it was a dream, but the seeds of doubt were planted, and I took to keeping a closer eye on Victoria, though I tried as hard as possible to conceal my suspicions. As I understand it, I was just stealthy enough that she never got wise. About a week later, after I had been reminded fourteen times, I took the Caprice—a beat-up dark blue '84—to my old man's garage and changed the oil. I told my father about it while trying to avoid the black glop that pissed out when I detached the used filter.

"So your wife's an alien, you say?" My father laughed, "That's a new one."

"All I said was that the dream was really vivid, and I had nosebleeds the next day."

"Y'know, I remember Sigmund Freud talking about this kind of crap. I think. Or maybe that was some nut on the History Channel. Anyways, they say dreams are warning signs about things actually happening to you. Your subconscious mind knew you were gonna get those nosebleeds before you really caught on."

"I'd say that was one of those nuts." I grumbled disdainfully, fumbling with the filter wrench.

"Whelp, maybe. In any case, I'd say you don't have to worry about your old lady being a tentacled alien. I used to have nightmares about your mother being a knife-wielding maniac."

"Didn't she stab you repeatedly once?"

"Well, yeah, but that's just a coincidence. They were just nightmares."

"Nightmares that turned out to be prophetic."

"Yep. Just as yours was about the nosebleed."

"No, no." I shook my head, having tightened the new filter. "You're saying my dream was a metaphorical prophecy. Yours was clearly literal."

"Well, your mother wasn't really laughing when she stabbed me, not like in the dreams."

"I thought you said she howled like a banshee."

"Yeah, but not at first. Y'see, in the nightmares she did it at first, not after five minutes of going at it with a kitchen knife."

"Y'know, Dad, I think you're making my case for me."

"Hmph." My dad thought about it for a minute. "Well shit, I guess I am."

"Y'see?"

"Look, Ben, your wife isn't a hideous alien from outer space. That's a bit of a stretch. My wife stabbing me, on the other hand, well...let's just say people weren't exactly crappin' their pants with shock when they heard she tried to murder me. And hey! We worked through it and we're happy as pigs in shit now. So maybe if your girl really is a horrible monster, you'll be happier in the end anyway." Dad patted me on my back and I decided not to press the conversation any further. We hung out for a few hours, and then I drove home wholly unsatisfied.

***

At this point, it's necessary to fast forward a little. A few months wore on and it was soon that time of year again when parents obeyed the pleas of retail stores everywhere to stock up on cheap toys, egg nog, and liquor. Over the last little while my suspicions had only grown in intensity; I saw Victoria repeat her murmuring gesture several times, and I noticed that she spent a growing amount of time on long walks through the forest east of town. Some people suspected her of infidelity—I knew better.

On Christmas Eve, she put the kids to bed while I set out 'Santa's' presents under the tree and in the stockings, leaving a Merry Christmas note on the plate of cookies I had been offered—after devouring them of course. I was nearly done setting them out when I noticed my wife standing at the top of the staircase to her bedroom, head cocked to the right as it had been on that walk all that time ago. And in the dim light I could see, from underneath her dress, a dangling tentacle, swaying gently back and forth. I hid from sight before she noticed me, and joined her in bed a few minutes later.

We exchanged our usual pleasantries, and I kissed her goodnight when she put her head to rest. I stayed awake, staring at her, wondering what it was I needed to do next. She would not admit her true nature to me—of this I was certain. The question was whether I had anything to worry about, or if my dad had been right about just accepting things as they were. Of course, the old coot was a Vietnam vet and an ex-trucker, so shocking, horrifying, or confusing things tended to roll of him like a water off a duck's back. No, I couldn't just accept this. I could not just sit idly by while my wife remained a disguised monster.

Besides, the sense of betrayal was overwhelming. We had been married for more than a decade, and she had been lying to me for even longer. It was simply unfair in the truest sense of the word that she did this to me—it was maddening. And so I decided I had only one choice—I had to kill her, to repay her for being a lying creature from another world.

I plotted throughout the night. My wife was an alien that needed to die, no matter how much she claimed to love me—her being a space monster simplified any feeling of guilt or apprehension I felt about that—and I was the only one that could do it. I thought of many things; from poison to cutting her brakes to burning down the house with her inside, but I eschewed all of them. Christmas Day came and went, and she carried on as per usual, having no idea that I had discovered her terrible secret.

Yes, she had to die. But how was I going to do it? I couldn't very well murder her in the house. That would traumatize the kids. And I couldn't make it look like an accident—that seemed to sneaky, too devious for me. I would rather commit an obvious murder than be an unconvicted, slimy rat for the rest of my life. If I got away with it I'd just be disappointed in my nation's justice system. No, I had to murder her blatantly and brutally, whether I could get away with there being no apparent motive or not. Of course, there was; as I mentioned, she was being accused of sleeping around behind my back. That, however, was something I could deny in court (as I will when they finally get around to trying me). Victoria wouldn't betray me like that, no. This was something far more devious and important than mere infidelity.

I could justify murdering her once the general public learned she was an alien. Clearly, if she had taken the identity of an earth woman and integrated herself into human society, she was a spy or some kind of saboteur. Perhaps she was part of the vanguard for an alien invasion, wearing down our civilization from within and learning our weaknesses. That seemed reasonable, and as soon as she was dead and her true form was revealed, it was easy to predict that I would be lauded as a hero at best and sentenced to death in a cover-up at worst. Either way, humanity would be better prepared, whether the majority of our species knew it or not.

And so, in late January I purchased a shotgun and ten shells—just in case I missed, or someone tried shooting at me. After that, it was just a matter of convincing myself I could do it and waiting for the right moment.

***

That moment came on a bright Tuesday in February, after a premature snow melt.

Victoria woke up around the time I went to work and told me she was going for another walk through the forest before heading off to the hairdressers. Nervously I told her that was nice and that I was in a rush—I walked to my work and she hopped in the Caprice and drove off. As soon as she was out of sight, I dashed back, packed my shotgun into a long suitcase I'd bought just for the job, and quickly hurried along.

My office at work is directly across Main Street from the hairdressers.'  I lay in wait behind my desk throughout the entire day—her walks were very long—and by the time she finally pulled up to the building and stepped inside, my shift was nearly over. The sky was perfectly clear and the air was motionless and damp, as it usually was in spring. I stood at the entrance to my work from about five minutes after she went to get her haircut until she finally emerged. My heart in my throat, I stepped into the street, opening the clasps on my case and reaching within.

She stared at me with her mouth agape for a moment, and then smiled warmly and waved, totally unaware. She rounded the car and opened the driver's door before she realized I was still approaching. Time seemed to stop—as if I was the only thing that could move an inch that day, every person, pet, and car on the street came to a halt when my weapon was drawn. Victoria stared into my eyes. She joined me in motion, her face showing a disturbed acceptance.

"Ben...wait. Just...just wait."

I pulled the trigger once and hit her in the stomach. In a movement that was harder than I remembered when I had fired the same sort of weapon as a teen, I pumped it and fired once more, this time into her chest.

She toppled back, eyes bulging, mouth flailing, snapped bone and cartilage whipping everywhere. It was a ghastly, gruesome death, and as she fell her mutilation caused me to fire twice more but sloppily, one shell shattering the driver's side headlight of the Caprice, the other popping the driver's side front tire. I stopped when my wife, or what was left of her, fell into a heap on the asphalt. I stood there for a second or two before two large men from the office tackled me to the ground, kicked me around a little, and sat on me for the police to arrest.

In spite of it all, though, I had done what I had set out to do. Hopefully, someday, humanity is grateful for that.