Llama Husband

                There comes a time in every woman’s life when she must buy a llama – and this was one of those times. Things had gotten out of hand for Natalie Wood, her life had not gone the way she had hoped it would.

She remembered a more optimistic time, when she believed in love and marriages and families and s educations and jobs and grocery stores. There had been a time when Natalie did not wake up in panicked cold sweats, attempting, in her sleep, to plan herself out of the situation she had landed in. But there had been lies that could not be untold.

                Let’s start with the failures. The failure to get stunning grades in High School, that lead to the miserable Community College, where the failure to pick a degree followed the failure to stay even reasonably sober at parties followed the failure at parking on the first day of classes. Dropping out of school may not have been a mistake, but doing so by getting carried along in some form mob madness in an anti-modern-architecture rant, assisting in the burning down of the school’s administrative building and getting banned for life, may have been.

                From there, it was easy to see how things could have gone downhill. Common mistakes like mistakenly assuming your common grocery store bag boy was pregnant preceded mistakes such as accidentally selling your roommates bike instead of your own, and suddenly Natalie found herself in an unfriendly world where she just could not bring herself to succeed.

                Things had gotten bad. Natalie could not hold down a job long enough to ever receive employee of the month, roommate rumors had and no one wanted to live with the girl who had sold someone else’s bike, and she could not, for the life of her, remember to call her mother on any major holiday. In a stroke of genius, possibly Natalie’s only stroke of genius for the rest of her comical life, she moved into married housing. The rent was cheaper without roommates, the neighbors left her absolutely alone when she told them she and her husband were brand-spanking- new newlyweds, and she could get by with very little furniture in her apartment with no one she had to share it with. The idea was such a good one, it filtered itself into other aspects of her life. A local gas station agreed to hire her, when it found out she and her new husband were “just trying to make it”. The next phone call with her dignified Mother, where Mrs. Wood attempted to chew Natalie out for not dating anyone, Natalie announced she had eloped and married a Chilean man named Harold Claus, a man who loved poetry and wove coats. When Mrs. Wood didn’t question the absurdity of a Chilean man with the surname of Claus, Natalie went ahead and filed for taxes and a wife, and expecting mother, experiencing lovely tax breaks and returns. She even found a way to take online classes at another community college, one she wasn’t blacklisted out, by weeping to the administrator about the difficulties of being a young wife and Mother. This elaborate story would have held up itself if no one cared much about Natalie Wood. But people did care, whether it was out of curiosity, familial love or to collect the proper amount of rent, people began asking questions. Weeks went by and Natalie made casual excuses, Harold was sick, or shopping or away selling coats. When no man had shown up in Natalie’s life with whom she could pretend was Harold, she began to get desperate.

                This is where the llama steps in. A llama, Natalie thought, could live in a small apartment, it didn’t need large spaces to roam through. A llama would walk around the apartment, and make stepping noises in two parts of the apartment at once, so that it was feasibly that Natalie was not living alone. A llama would be hairy, and would spit, would leave his hair and spit around the apartment, specifically the kitchen and bathroom, as, she imagined (having never actually spent much time round one). There was also the fur, or hair, or whatever llama’s grew, that she could then weave into coats, to leave lying around and offer as gift, leftovers from Harold’s coat business. She would have to buy twice the amount of food, and with the vegetables, she could tell people she was hoping they were expecting. A llama would make loud groaning noises, that could sound like newlywed love-making to her neighbors and landlord. When the horribly short man who had been coming to audit her, for possibly lying on her tax return form, she could stand behind the door while the llama pushed against it and groaned and snorted, and tell the tax man that it was a bad time, that her husband was horribly drunk and out of control, and to come back later.