Reinventing the Wheel

By Michelle Champagne

My husband is trying to reinvent the wheel. How do I explain this? He says he’s trying to perfect the circle. He says he can do better.

I disagree. The circle is perfect. He can do no better. Many things take the shape of a circle. For example, my hand scrubs in a circle across all of the clothes I’m washing as I watch him work outside. Me on one end of the yard, he on the other, and all of the Roman Empire walking by, watching a family where the woman works and the husband works on his genius. 

 A circle is the same shape as our children’s eyes when they ask me what’s for dinner and all I can say is bread because Spiros is busy attaching square wheels to our cart since he says the angles will create both the “necessary drag” while going downhill and also deter robbers. Money is shaped like a circle, but I have trouble remembering if that one’s true since I haven’t seen it in so long. Zero is also a circle. Complete and empty, like our children’s stomachs.

When I explain these things to him, particularly that last one, he tells me that the numeric form of zero is anachronistic for the time and place of this story and even so, is in fact an oval, not a circle. When I slap him, the mark on his cheek is an oval, not a circle. 

Once, when I was walking with my mother, she told me that men are like clay and it’s a woman’s job to mold them. I told her this was nonsense, and besides, if you leave clay outside in the burning sun all day like Spiros working on his wagon, it will dry up and always crumble at any mention of how maybe he could pursue his passions on the side, like after work and on weekends. She told me to pray for rain. 

When we whisper late at night as our children are snoring, he talks about his work in circles and I laugh at this, but he doesn’t find it funny. There’s an “o,” a circle, in the middle of “divorce.”

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About Michelle Champagne

Champagne is the Editor in Chief of Susurrus, A Literary Arts Magazine of the American South. She earned her Master’s degree in English from Wake Forest University, where was also the Graduate Fellow for Fiction Collective 2. Her work can be found in Ligeia, Sledgehammer Lit, Barren Magazine, and Porcupine Literary.