The Dead King

Davis realized he was looking at the television. Not watching, looking. A glaze. He wondered if his wife had noticed, there, sitting on the couch next to his favorite chair. His wife, Sandra, was a good woman who had suggested they play a game.

"What kind of game?" he had asked.

"Oh, any old game," she'd shrugged. "We have lots."

"I'm too tired for a game," was the thing he had told her. "Perhaps another night. Besides, there's a program I wanted to watch." And, luckily, there was a program on. "Ah, here it is," he said when he had found it, and he kept his eye fixated on the television screen because he could tell, but would never check, that her eye was fixated on him.

The program was on Henry VIII and his wives, and how one by one they all came to meet their particular fates. It turns out, Davis learned, that Henry VIII was not always the gorging beast of a man he thought he was. That once he was a slender fellow, handsome even, but that through years and years of ailment and neglect Henry turned into the picture Davis had in his mind if you had asked him to imagine the dead king. The program was narrated by an intelligent sounding gentleman, English, and Davis wondered what it was about the English accent that established intelligence and trust. And why it was able to establish it so quickly, and whether or not others found this to be true as well. He wondered what the answers would be if he asked his friends and colleagues what his voice meant to them. What those adjectives would be, how good, or how bad, and if it would hurt to hear the truth this time. He thought about this as he saw through the looking glass to the television beyond, and considered turning and asking his wife, Sandra, the woman he loved, what her answer would be. He thought of it for a moment, and decided against it.

The local news was now on, and Sandra was wrapped up in a story about a young girl who was hit by a car. "Thank God she's OK. Did you see that? And hardly a scratch. Thank the lord." Davis came to at the end of the story, just in time to see the little girl's mother tell, "It's a miracle. I don't know how, but you don't ask how. You just accept and be thankful." Sandra said that she agreed, and that she was tired and would go to bed soon. She left to go to the kitchen for her cup of decaffeinated tea that she always had at this time of night.

"Are you coming up?" she asked him. She asked in the way you ask a question where you don't expect an answer. Or, at least, the answer will not change your present plans.

"Not yet. I'll stay here a while longer. You go on up." He said this knowing full well she would have gone up anyway. This was their understanding.

He took the clicker and powered down the television. For a moment he projected the negative onto the screen. He blinked, and it vanished. He saw only himself, sitting in his favorite chair, looking back at him from across the room. Everything was darker in that glass, he thought, dark and curved, not a real reflection at all. But still he studied it, and wondered what the point was in using this thing as a mirror.

Sandra woke him the next morning. He sensed a firm, soft hand on his shoulder, squeezing slightly. "Davis. Davis, honey, wake up." He blinked, and blinked again, and looked up at his wife.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," he told her. "I fell asleep."