The Amazing Disappearing Woman

There was once a woman who woke up one morning and found, to her surprise, that
she had disappeared. She looked in the mirror and the person staring back at her
was unrecognisable. It wasn’t anyone she knew, and she didn’t equate the furrowed
lines, the greying hair and the eyes that plumbed the depths of sadness with anyone
she thought she knew. Deeply perturbed, she asked her husband where she had
gone. Her husband, a dull uninteresting sort of man looked right into her face, raised
the left corner of his flaccid mouth in a sneer, shook his head and turned his back.
Now increasingly discomfited, she wondered if she hadn’t only gone invisible but that
no one could hear her either. She ran up the stairs and burst into her sons dank
cavelike bedroom. She initially called his name quietly but then shouted his name as
loud as she could, so loud that the reverberation of the hysterical sound continued
filling the empty space long after her mouth had closed. The duvet bearing the
mournful legend of Wimbledon F.C did not move and, discounting his premature
death as the cause of this, she deduced that her hypothesis must be correct.
Shaken at this irrevocable proof of her total disappearance she retreated to her
bedroom and went back to the woman in the mirror. Shrugging, and making an ‘I-
don’t-know-what-the-hell-is-going-on’ face at her, the other woman paused, then
nodded thoughtfully in response.
The woman went about her usual daily business, cleaning the already spotless
house and hoovering imaginay dirt, glad of the space left by her pub dweling
husband to enable her to fulfil the responsibilities of her existence. Unfortunately, all
too soon, the pub dweller returned and stood swaying slightly in the doorway, his
distinctive odour of stale sweat and too much beer overlaid with salt vinegar and
chips filling the sanitised air freshened room. She looked up from her dusting,
hopeful of some gesture of recognition but he looked straight through her and made
his way into the showroom kitchen and threw his fragrant wrap of chips onto the
table. He reached for a plate and unwrapped them, overpowering the smell of
cleaning products in the sterile room. Ever conscious of the need to maintain a
pretence of visibility she followed him and made a show of getting the brown sauce
and the kitchen towel roll and placing them on the table for him. Her husband
ignored her, invisible as she was, and looked straight through the sauce bottle and
the unnecessarily floral kitchen towel. Belching loudly, an acid fume of beer and
dyspepsia filling the air he ostentatiously wiped his greasy fingers down the thighs of
his dirty tracksuit trousers that clung precariously to his hips, only held up by luck
and the pressure of the overhang of his beer belly. The dawning realisation that not
only was she invisible, so was everything she touched, horrified her and she
resolved to prove conclusively that she had truly disappeared.

With economy of movement, she pulled on her only coat and reached for her worn
out purse and made for the front door. The noise from the road made her gasp and
almost return to the relative safety of her sanitised home, but prove her invisibility
she must and she closed the door quietly behind her. The sequence of massive
lorries passed, and she watched for a gap in the traffic that she could cross through.
Spotting one, she tentatively put one foot on the road and prepared to move. Just as
she was about to propel herself into the crossing space she was distracted by the
roar from her husband in her right ear that demanded to know where the fuck she
thought she was going. Certain in the knowledge that he could not hear her, she
didn’t think there was any value in issuing a warning as he stepped forward as
though to face her, right into the path of a powerful motorbike as it sped up on its
descent down the hill on which she lived. It knocked the big, lumbering man into the
air with ease. Free of gravity and exhibiting no natural flying style he moed in slow
motion through the space that she had intended to occupy and landed with a
convincing, deadening thump on the bonnet of the car that stopped in horror to
watch the scene. She continued crossing the now still and silent road and opened
the newsagent’s door with its comforting ding of welcome. The daily greeting was
the same.