For those of you who read Operation Seth, posted earlier, it took third in the NY Challenge Short Story round one division. Round two just closed, and my prompts were: suspense, encroachment, and a hothead.

So here’s the 2500 word story that went off to the competition. Enjoy.

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE…

You know that Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner looks out the airplane window and sees a demon sitting on the wing, killing the engines with its claws?

I feel like Shatner, knowing a thing no one else can see is trying to kill me. I got diagnosed with an aneurysm eight months ago. A whole new world has closed down around me.

Most people don’t know they have one until the weakest part of the bulge in their blood vessel—aka an aneurysm—pops and you drop dead. Keeling over without warning earns you an autopsy, and that’s how you find out. Or the family finds out, more accurately. Assuming you’ve got family that cares.

My husband and I never had kids. I travel a lot for work—don’t ask; it’s a boring job convincing people to buy stuff—and last year I started coming home to things I hadn’t put in the house. A souvenir bottle opener from a resort we never visited. Tall green glass bottles of sparkling water. Cute cocktail glasses. My hubby, buying fancy stuff like that? He won’t even grocery shop. It all falls to me.

At first this didn’t penetrate my treadmill of work, sleep, cook, but one day I needed my 401K balance to fill out a form. My husband takes care of our finances, so I hardly ever look at the accounts. It took me fifteen minutes to find the password.

That bastard hadn’t been putting in the monthly $1,000 he was supposed to, plus the total was down more than $50,000 besides. Guess he counted on me never getting around to looking.

It’s amazing what you can see once you look straight at it.

Go ahead, blame me for not catching on sooner; I blame myself. I put the bottle opener, the sparkling water, and the missing money together. Then I told my husband I’d be gone two days and called in sick to work. That night I walked in on him and his gold-digger girlfriend. A divorced woman from church.

I opened my mouth to deliver the full weight of my wrath—

—and woke up in the emergency room. Several thousand dollars in tests later, some 19-year-old from a country I can’t pronounce pranced in to tell me I was oh-so-lucky that the aneurysm I didn’t know I had until that moment had not burst. “Unrelated hypotension” caused by “an extreme emotional state” saved my life, because now I knew I had one (an aneurysm, that is).

The little doctor actually wagged her finger at me.

“It is all about lifestyle. You must keep your blood pressure down. Avoid salt. No smoking, including second-hand smoke. Control anger and other intense emotions. Many people find it helpful to get a therapist. And if you feel stress coming on, try to calm yourself. Like this.”  She struck a yoga pose right there in the hospital chair. “Meditation over medication, as we say.” Then she wrote me a prescription for something called Losartan.

I googled “what causes aneurysms” from my hospital bed. Cigarette smoke. Plus what websites politely call “unaddressed stress.” Like maybe finding sparkling water you didn’t buy in your fridge. Does eating crow require salt? I would be feeding my husband a steady diet of that until the divorce. Maybe I’d use his daily pack of cigarettes to stuff the bird.

Discharged with this demon sitting on my chest waiting its chance to rip me apart, I went home and ripped my husband a new one.

“I am done letting you smoke in the living room. You are done screwing another woman in our bed. We are done. On Monday I get a lawyer. Get out.”

He went outside and smoked a cigarette. Or five.

A different guy came back in, the world’s most solicitous husband. He said he had just sent a message to end it with the gold-digging bitch. He would give up cigarettes and vape on the front porch. Would I please remind him what color I wanted to paint the living room, and then damn if he didn’t go buy the paint and do it. He started making dinners—low-salt dinners, and this guy puts salt on salt. If I so much as look at a lamp, he turns it on or off.

He even made me a mocktail using sparkling water.

“I thought you might try this, since your doctor’s advising against alcohol,” he said. “I can change the flavor if you want; this is lime.”

“When did you start mixing drinks?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Who taught you?”

He frowned. “Does it matter? If you don’t like it, I won’t make any more. Did you take your blood pressure today? How was it?”

I did like the mocktail, so he made me another, pear-flavored. Then he made dinner. The only thing that man wouldn’t do for me was talk about why he’d had an affair.

I tried several times. Took a deep breath and swore to myself I wouldn’t get angry, I’d ask and listen. But he always said the same thing. “It’s done. I was wrong, I said I’m sorry. Let’s move forward.” He said it so often that once I couldn’t help myself and mouthed it along with him. His back was to me—he was at the sink doing dishes—so he didn’t see.

Twenty-six years of marriage gets you used to how you communicate. I had always talked to him, but he didn’t talk to me. When I thought about that, I got mad. When I got mad, my blood pressure went up.

I didn’t take up yoga, but I did change jobs. Same company, because I needed the insurance, but now I sit home taking phone calls from people using the software wrong, solving their self-made problems for them.

Them: It won’t total.

Me: Which column are you using? That’s not the one you want. Let’s walk through the spreadsheet together.

Fantasy me: It won’t add revenue in the depreciation column, ya fucking eejit.

Finally I lost my temper like I knew I would someday and said it out loud, and got written up. I can’t afford to do that again. I need the insurance.

I get bored being at home so much, but it’s fun watching him cook and clean and put away groceries. He buys low sodium everything. And I like how the living room walls look clean and shiny robin’s egg blue, not tobacco residue yellow.

He sneaks one now and then, a cigarette. He comes in from “vaping” and changes his clothes and thinks I don’t know. But I do. Like I know the demon (now officially labeled an ascending aortic aneurysm) sitting atop my heart is growing; it feeds off the smoldering ruins of what lies unsaid. It feeds off second-hand smoke.

It’s ironic the demon is inside me because of him, given he hasn’t put anything else inside me for years. Our sex life petered out five years ago. His idea. One day he said he just couldn’t get it up anymore. Yeah, I was aware of that, but there could still be cuddling. Except, there never was.

Sick people aren’t allowed to be angry. Neighbors see me out walking (it’s good for your heart) and ask how I am, then shrink back when I let fly with some rapid-fire version of “I’m afraid all the time, confused, and way too self-pitying for polite company.”

They shouldn’t ask if they don’t want to know.

My favorite response so far is “Well, we’re all dying. Now that you know, you can take good care of yourself.”  A few offer unsolicited dietary advice (kale features big here) or bring up their uncle who lived another ten years after being diagnosed with an aneurysm. Most just smile with a look of fear in their eyes and wave goodbye.

Guess I was supposed to be inspirational, not honest. Talking to someone who reminds you of your own mortality sucks.

Nobody wants to hear how scared I am, including my husband.

Last week, I got mad for the last time and opened fire in the living room. “Do you have any idea how it feels that you’re part of what’s killing me? The stress, the smoke, and you won’t even talk to me about it all.”

He jumped up and said, “That’s why I repainted the living room. We could get a new couch. I need to get the laundry out of the washer.”

I got up to follow him, but my chest was pounding, so I took my blood pressure: 170/90. I went to bed.

That was my final last try. Forget this smoking pile of ruins, I would take what was left of my 401K (which I now oversaw solo) and go do whatever I wanted. And could still afford. What was I waiting for anyway, my life to start? Ha. Waiting for it to finish. Haven’t I spent too much of my life waiting for nothing much of anything?

So I got up the next day and started the paperwork to close my retirement fund before I went to a doctor’s appointment. The cardiologist, grim-faced, sat me down and said aneurysms didn’t usually grow as fast as mine. If surgery was my decision, it was now or never. (Or what, let the damn thing pop, I started to say, but for once held back. She’s a nice woman. She’s on my side.)

“You and I have discussed the surgical challenges of your aneurysm’s location,” she said. “Go home and talk things over with your husband. If you choose surgery, let’s schedule soon.”

I knew the stats from the Mayo Clinic website. And a second opinion via AI. People with miracle-grow aneurysms have about a twenty percent survival rate five years after diagnosis, even with surgery, but my sneaky little demon twisting around my heart’s ascending aortic U-bend dropped me to five percent. Which still beat zero. What decision?

At home, I didn’t bother talking to my husband, but when I went to schedule the surgery, I couldn’t find my phone. I picked up his to call mine, just as this message flashed across his screen: “Can’t wait to see you at the usual. I’ll be wearing THE DRESS. For the first minute, anyway.”

I’m good at tech. Soon I had their whole sexting string, which picked up two months after I got home from the hospital. Twice she asked him how long the doctors gave me. Guess she wasn’t done with the 401K yet.

After I scheduled my surgery, I told him I had a required conference coming up and would be gone four days. Then I closed the 401K.

He came out to see me off the day I left for my “conference.” My room was ready at Trinkle Mansion Spa; I always wanted to stay there. I had a massage, took a nap, then went shopping. Bought a gorgeous silk bathrobe and a diamond necklace. Went to a movie in that theatre with the heated seats and drank their best wine. Ordered lunch the next day delivered to my mansion room from the French place with the Michelin star.

After lunch, I drove home, parked down the street, and waited until they went out. I snuck in through the garage and emptied our medicine chest of old prescriptions: painkillers from dental surgery, my blood thinners, pills he never took for his restless leg syndrome. Everything swirled like smoke into the glass of water I stirred until nothing showed. After touching this to my tongue with the tip of one finger, I added sugar. It all fit into the green glass bottle of sparking lime water. Then I drove to the hospital.

Tonight, they will make cocktails and make love. Tomorrow, I undergo surgery. Tonight I am wearing my 401K around my neck, drinking mocktails with my demon. And humming a song half-remembered from childhood: ashes, ashes, we all fall down.