[ WP ] You and your wife wear rings that let you feel each other 's heartbeat . Your wife dies and is buried with the ring on , and you always wear the ring in memorial to her . One day the ring turns on again ...

Know Better 
 
 Even though he was already in the car and driving, Leslie knew better. The heart-wrenchingly childish instinct to believe in the miraculous and the fantastical had long been stripped from how he knew the world worked. He'd served during wartime; he'd learned the actual rules of the game. Yet here he was, on the road at three in the morning doing the exact opposite. 
 
 The wedding ring he'd worn for twenty four years was clinched in his hand. When he and his husband had `` became as one,'' they'd given each other bands that transmitted the other's pulse into tiny vibrations through their own. As he held it in his hand, he considered why he'd wanted to wear the ring so much more now than when Bryan was still alive. He used to remove it so frequently, all reasons under the same umbrella of mere privacy: to masturbate, the nap when he should have been working, to hide the times when he was angry, and sometimes just to truly be left alone for a little while. He considered these all to be respectable, solid reasons, and yet now he felt the gross desire to flagellate himself for these little windows of selfishness; to remind himself of the age old lesson we all know from the time we're little but tend to ignore until its too late. That when it's gone, it's gone. And this was now his great emotional and intellectual dilemma: the ring had begun to vibrate again in the middle of the night. 
 
 It'd been three days since he'd had to helplessly look on as the only person to ever love him so perilously as to grant him total access to all of the foul, unattractive reminders of his imperfect and unflattering total humanity - his oversights, his compulsions, his true reality - be put into the earth. He knew he was gone in his mind. There'd been no ambiguity in his death. He'd been thrown from his car and had cracked his skull on a concrete drainage pipe in a ditch when he landed. He'd had to look over the body in the morgue that both looked like the body he so intimately knew and did n't, like some foreign shell of something familiar. He'd picked out his husband's funeral attire and withstood a barrage of guests in his home for days and he'd went to sleep by himself. But as he continued toward the cemetery, he tried to remind himself of the many stories of those buried alive or pronounced dead only to resuscitate once again and tried not to rule out the possibility. 
 
 And what if it were true? Just as he'd initially struggled to accept the news that his husband was dead, he now struggled to possibly believe he could still be alive. The similarity in these two opposing resistances had found a fault in his rational resolve. He began remembering the exceptional things ( to him ) about his husband: that despite weighing less than 250 pounds, Matthews always felt like some slab of rock nearly impossible to budge. How the springs and frame would stress and croak every night when he came to bed. He remembered that, despite no exceptional history with alcohol or drugs, his husband had always had a high tolerance against all manner of sedatives, even anesthesia, and when he needed to be put down for shoulder surgery, the doctor had remarked to him how strong he was and had to up the dosage. Perhaps this mysterious inner strength he harbored was also resilient enough to resist death. 
 
 But even so, what could be done with a human who'd already suffered brain damage and now had been pronounced dead for a week? The best case scenario, Leslie tried to imagine, would be to have his husband return but return to a permanent coma; living death. And a permanent coma meant hospitals and doctors and in-home care and all of those meant a permanently increasing bill that he could not pay. What would be the point? 
 
 But perhaps it could also mean that he might possibly be able to open his eyes, in only once, if only briefly. Perhaps he would be able to hear Leslie speak to him, even if his voice had to travel far down a dark and lonely well inside. He would be able to hear him be assured that he is loved. Or perhaps he could feel Leslie simply squeeze his hand. Any little sensory keyhole for Leslie to pass even a sliver of information through. He'd been the cynic for so much of his life b/c life had taught him to be that way, but looking down at the pulsing ring and thinking of the extraordinary, uncharacteristic good luck he knew he'd had in finding and keeping his Love, he also now found no corner in his mind that could unequivocally assure him good things did n't and could n't happen. 
 
 Getting closer into town, with all of the street lamps and billboards and stop-lights operating almost solely for him, like little beacons of something like hope, he began to fancy a scene of Matthew sitting up in a hospital bed with the top of his head bandaged laughing. He would be playfully jabbing at Leslie about letting them bury his husband alive or jokingly posing the question of whether or not perhaps he had wanted him to go already. And Leslie dared to think he would be perfectly okay with these lighthearted ribbings about the extent of his commitment; they were preferred over the alternative. 
 
 There were several police cars parked with their lights flashing as he pulled into the cemetery and he puzzled over how they could also have been let in on what was going on. As he neared Matthew's plot, where two cars already were, a young officer approached him with his hand up in a halting fashion as he could see two others standing together and looking down at something behind one of the cars. He got out to stand up and better see what was happening, looking past the young officer to not only see his husband's plot already dug up, but to see several more officers and cars further down shining headlights and flashlights on another freshly dug grave that had also been unearthed. When he told the boy who he was, the officer began to apologize and attempted to find a tender way to explain what he already knew. When the young man asked if he'd like to see what was taken, Leslie declined and got in his car and left. 
 
 As he drove back out of town, away from the lamps and the billboards and into a darker night where the light was not waiting, he permanently removed the still vibrating ring and let the window down and let it go. Now he knew better. 
 
 

