Here is a picture of a cat

We were all that year waking up in the middle of the night to show a sort of solidarity with our wives who were sleeping peacefully when we met in the neighborhood to discuss the possibility of traveling through time. An idea that none of us really thought much about. We were mostly there to drink whiskey and think about Frank's wife. She was sleeping upstairs like the rest of our wives, the children were all too old to worry over, and we now felt guilt for all the nights that we had missed when they were young, but we knew we couldn't ask them, grown as they were, to sit around and let us read them a story because of some deep guilt we'd associated with them from the first few months they'd been in the world. So we didn't talk to them much, the differences hurt too damn much.




"If I had hair like that I'd stay single forever"

The difference between Frank's wife and all of ours was not a thing that anyone would describe as subtle. The woman was getting younger. While all our wives were starting to fade up same as us, Frank's wife had started living backwards around thirty or so. She looked like she was in her mid-twenties again, and no one said a damn thing about it. We covered her, created fake trips to L.A. where she'd had plastic surgery. We said that she'd been seen on a daily basis at the new yoga studio on Main street where it seemed not a soul could ever be seen.

I guess the thing we were all waiting for, this group of aging and strange men, was for Frank's wife to get up some night and drag herself downstairs for a cup of water. On at least three different occasions a couple of us remember actively trying to imagine her having a dry throat and even going so far as to cough loudly in an attempt to wake her up, or get her to mimic it as though it was a sneeze. To be honest, we hadn't thought the whole thing through.

You see, we were all wondering if time travel was possible. I hope it's implicit now that we just wanted to go back to those first few months of our children's lives to try and convince them not to hate us. We'd make bottles and stay up all night holding them if they liked that sort of thing. We were, none of us I swear, planning to go visit Jerusalem or Rome or anything. We had enough of our own problems to not go digging around for more. It was clear to us all that she'd traveled.

Frank was sitting to my left chewing on a toothpick and trying to figure out whether to fold or play. At times, we'd forget the charade of talking about traveling and just play a few hands of cards. And we'd pass around a few bucks for hours while we waited for Frank's wife to come downstairs for a glass of water and just maybe tell us how she'd done it. I was up 2.58 and using two separate mirrors in the dining room to assist in my betting. The cheating was less about the money and had everything to do with compulsion. We all loved her.