“Just don’t,” I tell him as I pour my first cup of coffee.
Mr. Ackshually blows through that stop sign and informs me, in a tone I’m sure he doesn’t find condescending, that I should put ice packs on my perineum to help relieve the menstrual cramps.
I should have known better than to moan, as I dragged myself into the kitchen, "Can I just get on with menopause already?”
He's always been a know-it-all, but ever since the kids flew the coop, the stream of unsolicited advice has become insufferable. My friends call him a mansplainer, but he’s an equal-opportunity annoyer. Last week I overheard him lecturing our neighbor—he of the prizewinning dahlias—about the best time to prune his rosebushes.
"That’s for after childbirth, hon,” I say, my eyes plotting an escape route.
“Ackshually—”
At times like this, I usually think back to when I found his aggressive erudition comforting, sometimes even charming—chatting up our gondolier in Italian on our honeymoon, pointing out the constellations to the kids on a camping trip, talking me down with treatment statistics when my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Now all I want is to throttle him until all that misguided certainty explodes out the top of his head.
“That’s enough,” I say, stirring. “Ice helped when those enormous babies you put in me left it feeling like braised chuck roast down there. But it’s useless for my current situation.”
While he goes on about how he’s sure I must be mistaken, I scroll through my phone. “Average life expectancy is seventy-five years and eight months. Only twenty-four years, three months, and sixteen days until I’m out of my misery.”
“Ackshually, it’s higher for women.”
He can’t help himself. I almost pity him.
“It’s not my days I’m counting down, dear.”
Jim Parisi lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth. and their dog, Dolce. He writes fiction and creative nonfiction, which has appeared in FlashFlood Journal, The Bluebird Word, Five Minutes, Club Plum, and The Good Life Review, among others.
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