Secret Powers

It was on a quiet Thursday night that I first began to suspect something peculiar about my wife.

We’d opted against watching something, choosing instead to lose ourselves in literature. We sat there, drinking tea on opposite ends of the couch, each with a book open in front of us. The evening felt not just pleasant but serene.

That is, until I asked the question that would change everything.

“What’s the weather supposed to be like tomorrow?”

The coming climate held little interest to me. Truthfully, I had just finished a chapter, and the question provided me with a moment to ‘come up for air,’ so to speak, before diving back into the narrative, one which was heading with anxiety-inducing haste towards its climax.

But an instant after the question left my lips, I remembered: just twenty minutes ago my wife had lamented her phone battery’s total depletion. Furthermore, she had not removed herself from the couch to plug it in, but had simply leaned over to set it on one of the stylish Bush Home end tables we’d recently purchased. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen her fiddle with something, but my book demanded my focus, so I thought nothing of it.

I began to tell her never mind, that I could check later, when an answer came: “Looks like sixty-five degrees, maybe a little windy but nice.”

I looked over and what did I see but my wife holding her phone, its glow disproving what she’d told me not a half-hour ago.

“I thought your phone was dead,” I said.

“It was,” she said. “I charged it.”

And that’s when a number of strange scenes presented themselves in my memory: the way, in the dry months of winter, she seemed to suffer static shocks of almost astounding power; how the streetlights flickered when I drove underneath them with her in the car; how, on at least three occasions, our block had lost power, but only our house had regained it within the hour after my wife had gone down to the breaker box in the basement to “take a look at things.”

Reality shifted around me, and desperately I grasped for something to keep it in place, even just for a moment longer. “But you didn’t get up,” I muttered.

“Yeah, I plugged it into the table,” she said. “They have hidden charging ports. Check the one on your side.”

I leaned back and looked. Sure enough, on the back of the Bush Home end table on my side of the couch, there was an outlet, a USB-A port, and a USB-C port built right in.

I should’ve felt relief in that moment.

Instead, all I could think was, What else is she hiding?