Their feet softly clacked against the plaster floors of the art gallery as they paced from artefact to artefact, furrowing their brows and scrutinizing every piece as if they had the slightest inkling of its meaning. Left to his own devices, Jim would spend all day reading over each long and winding diatribe painted on the wall explaining the exhibit adjacent to it, alternating each sentence read with another glance, each more knowing and impactful than the rest.

He was not left to his own devices, however. He was with Evangeline.

Evi loved the aesthetics of art but was hardly a deep-minded connoisseur. She'd use the canvas as a background for her own glorification, posing in front of each oeuvre as if it were nothing more than a painted set piece, using the life's work of a starving auteur to make her frame seem more defined or her features more alluring. After she had taken her photos she'd hop along to the next exhibit leaving Jim alone in a cloud of euphoric, ignorant dust.

Sooner or later, as she bubbled around, she'd realize that Jim was missing and call back to him, but for now, he enjoyed his moment in peace, not having to objectify each work, but able to soak them in and feel all the beauty and imagination, the sweat and tears, the blood and history that had gone into every one of them.

"Kind of look like dicks, don't they?" Evi asked, popping up behind him, unexpectedly. "I remember, when I'd come here with Freddy [her old boyfriend] I'd point them out, and he'd shush me and tell me to stop making a scene."

"They've been here that long?" Jim asked, still engrossed by the admittedly phallic, but intriguing pink stalagmites rising out of the museum floor. Jim could almost picture himself snorkeling through some cocaine-fuelled 1970's Hollywood executive's picture of a love cave and seeing those oddly enticing formations guarding the barrier between the square and the groovy. Evi thought more along the lines of a mushy, glistening, deep-breathing tentacle monster filled with manly juices and ready to violate a busload of unexplainably busty Japanese schoolgirls en masse, but Jim ignored the thought for now. Reading her mind was beginning to exhaust him; her thoughts wore him down like an invisible ball and chain strapped to his ankle.

Evi's steps were growing impatient, but Jim stopped in front of a glass printed, blown-up photo of what appeared to be a giant scar traversing across human skin.

"You know what that is right?" Evi brushed up against him, pulling his arm as if to protect him from dragging himself too deeply into something he might later regret.

"No," Jim replied, absentmindedly. What did he care what it was? It was beautiful, and he was going to stare it until it was no longer that way.

"It's a," Evi lowered her voice and cupped her mouth to Jim's ear, saying each syllable as furtively as possible, like she was spelling out a code word only they could know, "va...gi...na."

Jim didn't move.

Evi turned red.

Jim tilted his head, examining the photo in greater detail.

"Why are you still looking at it? Let's go." Evi's tone was still hushed, so Jim couldn't quite make out if it was amused or ashamed.

There was absolutely no way it was vagina. The slice was too thin. The fold of skin too small. Unless, of course, that was what the artist was going for. The inherent emasculation of scars. The blade, a phallic allegory for the penis, stabbing, i.e. penetrating the victim, leaving a permanent reminder of their penetration, a mark of femininity that betrayed weakness, cowardice and submission to the masculine power of others. Was this the horror of womanhood? Living each day with a symbol of the victim physically attached to themselves. An open wound that literally bled each month to recall its owner's slavery to the cycle, to the system of abuse and torture that so defined human society.

"C'mon, Jim! You're embarrassing me." Evi pulled Jim away.

Or, maybe it was just a vagina. Jim certainly hadn't seen enough to be an expert. Hardly like Evi to be so abashed from a flesh-wound. Besides, one prone to such thinking could not be safely considered to be in an ordinary state of mental health. C'est misogyne, as his wife would say.

"Hey!"

Jim looked around and saw a hooded figure dressed entirely in black saggy clothing run up to him, twirling around a giant, fifteen-inch pink dildo like it was a pistol, shouting for everyone to drop to their knees. Jim, assuming this was some sort of performance piece, obeyed (although his showed his disdain with a well-timed roll of the eyes), while his wife, who remained standing to the side, chuckled to herself.

The hooded figure approached Jim and began uncomfortably waving his crotch within a few precious centimeters of Jim's face.

"Yeah, you like that, huh? You like that?" the man said.

"No, not really," Jim replied, his words muffled by his desperately trying to remove his mouth from the vicinity of the man's genitals.

The man slapped Jim across the face with his dildo, hard enough that blood began pouring from his left ear. Jim fell over in pain, only for the man to lift Jim by his hair and press his crying face directly into his crotch. Evi looked on in bewilderment.

"Yeah, I knew you liked it, fag! Ha! I fucking knew it."

"Please," Jim pleaded, sweet, sugary tears pouring down his face. "Please stop. You're hurting me."

"Yeah, why don't you suck on a bit, fag," the man's thick, syrupy voice rang so high above Jim it felt like it was from the heavens. He unzipped his pants and unveiled a Tokarev handgun sticking, well-oiled and erect, out of his fly.

Jim gulped. He obviously didn't want to do it, but the man had left him no choice. He could feel his body shutting down; his system going into shock. Already his extremities were going cold, and he could feel a shaking tremor run throughout his body.

Maybe if he did it, the man would stop. He'd go away, and they could return to the art gallery. Yeah, that was okay. It was just a gun after all. Plenty of people put them in their mouths all the time. It couldn't be that bad.

Jim placed his lips tentatively on the pistol only for the man to laugh and shove his head forcibly onto his crotch, stuffing the cold iron all the way to the back of Jim's throat, gagging him. Giant, painful sugar-cube tears shot down Jim's cheeks as he recoiled in pain at the icy metal in the gullet, but he managed to move his mouth back and forth against the barrel, his sugar-watery eyes staring up at the man for approval.

The figure removed his hood and laughed in pleasure.

"Gregor!" Evi exclaimed before running to greet him with a kiss.

The two embraced passionately, their tongues exploring the deep, watery crevasses of the others' mouth in exquisite detail, all while Jim monotonously rocked his lips back and forth along the hardened steel.

The man pulled back from Evi with a start, a trail of saliva puddling onto to Jim's face as he took a deep breath of pure ecstasy.

"Blyat!" he said in a thick, clouded Russian accent. "I think that cucky faggot of yours is about to make me-"

He grunted and ejaculated a bullet straight through Jim's skull. Evi howled with laughter burying her guffaws in another sloppy, moistened kiss.

Jim awoke with a start.

Had that all just been a ploy to stop him from investigating into Gregor? His bed felt so comforting and his wife, warm beside him, but he couldn't let Evi lull him into a false sense of security.

He swung his legs over the bed and plopped onto the floor like ketchup from an old, drying glass bottle: nothing and then all at once. The ground shook with the impact, but Evi was too sound a sleeper to notice. Jim plodded off to the kitchen.

He knew that there was a Victoria Secret shop in Rideau Centre, and that must have been where Evi had gone shopping. He typed the address into Google maps and then the address of Evi's work.

Seventeen minutes by bus.

Okay, and how long to get home from there? About twenty minutes. So, it almost added up.

Almost.

At the minimum, this meant Evi spent over twenty-three minutes in the lingerie shop. It was definitely plausible. Evi had a penchant for fashion, and she particularly loved looking sexy and desirable. It wouldn't surprise Jim if she had spent many long minutes admiring her form in the mirror, carefully selecting the pieces that most accentuated her assets and obscured her liabilities. Maybe she even took a few steamy photos for some fun later on.

But fun with whom?

Was that why she took so long to buy one set of underwear? Was she trying everything she could get her hands on and then snapping the results, sending them over to Gregor with flirty captions and suggestive emojis? Perhaps even a few glimpses while changing between sets?

Of course, most of this was just in Jim's imagination. He had to be rational. Evi obviously hadn't been seeing someone else yesterday as he had first suspected, so that was certainly a good sign. But the doubt continued to linger.

Why else evade the questions about Gregor? Why else become offended by his probes? Why so quick to change the subject and capitulate to all of Jim's whims and desires? Evi might well be innocent, but her actions would not vindicate her alone. Only her text conversations could do that.

Jim would have to go deeper. Much deeper.

Jim meandered over to the bathroom sink and carefully stretched out a string of floss just long enough to cross each of his knuckles twice with a few centimeters left over for the teeth. He opened his mouth and began tensing his gums for the trip of pure agony they would endure as he attempted to unhook the last of the previous night's popcorn from the jagged crevasses of his exposed skeleton.

"I don't know why you do that."

Evi stood beside him, dressed only in a billowing shirt of her husband's detailing the wonders of some family reunion long before the two had ever met. She had her toothbrush dangling ever so slightly below the toothpaste tube, obviously ready to squirt, but preferring to insert a few chastisements before she got down to the dirty work.

"Do what, dear?" Jim asked, his voice exhausted and strained.

"We have so much floss. I don't understand why you use so little all the time."

"I guess I'm just cheap." He inserted the floss, not at all interested in whatever conflict Evi was attempting to stir up.

"But wouldn't it make you happier to spend a little more and live more comfortably?" She seemed genuinely curious, a rarity for anyone so early in the morning. Though, it was a Saturday, so she'd already been up nearly hour to do her run. Perhaps there was still some residual energy she needed to extinguish into Jim, like burning out a cigarette onto the skin of a torture victim.

Jim removed his floss, but he didn't make eye contact. Instead, he just stared at his sordid reflection in the mirror and mumbled to himself. "We live in comfort because I spend so little."

Evi shook her head before plunging her strangely oversized pink toothbrush into her mouth. Jim fixated on it, his eyes unable to shift away from this giant pink cylindrical object slipping in and out of his wife's lips.

"Quoi?" she inquired through the muffle of the brush and the white foamy spittle that suctioned it to be mouth.

"Oh, nothing," Jim said, averting his gaze. "Just, you look very beautiful today."

Evi rolled her eyes and continued brushing, but Jim could see a slight twinging of the outer lip that might just indicated a smile.

And she certainly was very beautiful. In contrast to her husband who rarely walked more than two flights of stairs at time before gasping for breath, she worked on a different area of her body every day at the gym, and unlike most who toil, she had sculpted a masterpiece. Even shrouded in an enormous dollop of linen, her shape more than hinted at the wonders beneath, and her frizzled, disorderly brown hair pointed elegantly down the straight, glossy cavern of her back.

Jim stared at his own shirtless body in the mirror and wondered if Evi would think the same. He was curvaceous, that was for certain, although not in the same pleasantly curvy way of his wife. His belly protruded over his waist and a long, winding roadway of hair stretched from neck to navel and even below like the shattered, cracking ancient asphalt of a Montreal overpass. His hair was wispy, nearly phantasmal in fact, the last few shreds of blond locks kept only there for the memory of what once was, not the hope of what was still to be. His breasts were pronounced and drooping like those of a withered old milkmaid, and gravity pulled them closer to the centre of the earth every day.

Jim wondered if they had become larger than Evi's. He glanced in the mirror, but they were mostly obscured by Evi's shirt. As she leaned closer to the sink to spit, one could roughly calculate their size by the overhang of the cloth, but Jim had always had a more mathematical precision about him.

He knew she was a 30B. Or, more accurately, he knew that was size of bra he would buy her without it being returned. Although, to think of it, he typically only purchased underwear for special occasions where it was typically acceptable for the fit to be tighter, so maybe it was leaning closer to 32B.

He definitely wasn't even remotely close to thirty inches along the chest. Even without all the excess weight, Jim had a meaty frame and a chest approaching close to fifty inches, not thirty. As for the cup size...

"James, what are you doing?"

Jim stopped fondling himself. "You know, just checking for lumps. You should too, you know. I think you're probably at higher risk."

"Self-exams don't work. Women just freak themselves out and then the doctor screws up the test and cuts off a perfectly healthy tit." Evi smiled devilishly, turning to her husband. "You wouldn't want that would you?" she said, giving an exaggerated jiggle.

Perhaps he was still a little smaller, but not by much. Though, Evi had always been a little more flat-chested than was perhaps average. Not that he minded; he was a very modern, forward-thinking man, after all.

Jim smiled, realizing the pause in conversation had gone on too long. "You're darn right about that, dear," he said, jokingly but still tender. He bent down to kiss her.

Evi beamed before walking over to the shower.

"Join me?" she asked, biting her lip sensually as Jim heard the first test drops of water splash against the ceramic tiles.

"In a minute!"

Perhaps she liked bigger guys. Her father was definitely not a thin man. There could be some Freudian logic at play. Though, Evi's history didn't seem to lean in that direction. Freddy, he remembered, seemed to have ripped all the fat off his body and clumped it into his cartoonishly massive nose.

He never could understand why she put up with him for so long. Looking at their photos it always felt like some impromptu live-action remake of The Beauty and the Beast. Then again, after stumbling into a few photos of their beach days, and seeing the tone of his abdomen, it had become rather obvious.

His intelligence perhaps, could that have been it? Jim had certainly helped her through much of university. There were a couple of assignments where he'd perhaps put in a little more input than was academically honest, but this hardly qualified one for marriage. Besides, he wasn't really all that smart in comparison to her. She spoke seven languages; he had barely managed to nail down two. Even his closest friends said his French was "bureaucratic at best."

Humour. Was he funny? Maybe once, but he couldn't remember the last time she had actually laughed at one his jokes instead of simply rolling her eyes. Jim was genuinely worried his wife might spontaneously suffer an aneurysm from her eyes rolling back at him hard enough to burst a blood vessel.

Was it their friendship? Nearly three years before they had even started dating. Jim had read in The Economist that the overwhelming majority of couples were composed of people just as attractive as the other, but in couples who had been friends before they dated, the differential in appearance was often greater.

Jim struggled to recall exactly why this was, but he thought it had something to do with a woman's child-rearing instincts. No, that was a sexist thing to think. Child-rearing instincts? Was this the 1950's. Did he want his wife loafing around the kitchen, barefoot, pregnant and unable to escape his grimy clutches?

No, definitely not. If she truly wanted someone better, she deserved to be with him. He only wanted what was best for Evi, what would make her happy. If that wasn't him anymore, what point was there in continuing to hold her back?

Although, a baby could also make her happy. He knew Evi wanted one. Starting a family was all she could talk about in the early days, when they had first met all those years ago in university. One of the first times they'd gone to dinner, though they were still friends at that point, she'd detailed her rather intricate plan of marrying a wealthy Canadian businessman, getting her citizenship, baring his child and then stabbing her husband in the back with an ornate, heirloom letter-opener and ruling his empire through their offspring as regent. He had laughed and called her Wu Zetian and though she hadn't the faintest idea what that meant, she smiled and accepted the compliment, a mischievous twinkle flashing in her eye.

They'd discussed it as well before marrying, but the conversation had long since veered away into obscurity. They were always burdened by a mountain of prerequisites, each simple in and of itself, but exhausting and impossible in their entirety. They needed a house in the suburbs, not just a trendy, bohemian apartment in the Glebe. They needed a reliable vehicle, not stuffed and unscheduled public transportation. Evi needed an Ontario license, and Jim needed to remember how to drive. They had to start an RESP so that their eventual progeny could afford to go college. They had to get their promotions so that they had a better source of income.

On and on the checklist continued until it became pointless to even attempt checking off one box, much less tackling the whole list.

But maybe they didn't need the list. Those were just excuses stopping them from pursuing what they really wanted. Maybe a baby would solve everything! They'd have a common project to tend to together, a set of goals to unite them, a loving child to make them feel nurturing and cared for.

Jim's eyes lingered on his wife's body as it glistened in the steaming mist of the shower.

Evi wouldn't be so rail thin anymore, either. Her breasts would swell and start to drag. Her hips would expand. Her belly would poke out, and even after the pregnancy was long done she'd never be able to work off all the extra fat along her thighs and buttocks. She'd be as loveable and pudgy as ever.

And they could go for walks in the neighbourhood, a stroller casually gliding in front of them, and not have to worry about the construction workers shouting their every carnal thought or lusty eyes fixing their gaze to Evi's discomfort. They'd just be an innocent little family, above scrutiny, above desire, above sex, protected finally from the predators that surrounded it.

And the world would be forced to see his wife as Jim already did. Not as some object of base sexual gratification, but a woman of great talent and prestige, of hidden kindness and gentle love and of tremendous intellect and sharp wit. To them, she'd no longer be Evangeline, the girl I'd like to fuck, but Evangeline, mother and aspiring ambassador.

Or perhaps it was more feminist to switch the order. No matter, Jim was sure she'd choose to arrange the titles however she best saw fit when the time was right.

"Jim, are you coming?" Her voice, once dripping arousal, was now bordering on irascibility.

"Yep, on my way."

Jim shed his pajama bottoms and headed over to the shower, but not before giving the half-empty ring of birth-control pills a subtle glance, lying on the countertop, just waiting to be shoved aside.