Holly Gramazio

"A novel about a woman who one day comes home to find her attic is magic and producing an endless supply of interchangeable husbands"--

A Novel

The Husbands

Laura Dobie

An architect, though! What a perfect job for a husband. Ambitious yet concrete, artistic yet practical, glamorous yet without an industry-wide drug problem.

You're okay with Amos and Lily, right?' Elena says, pointing. ‘Neither of them knows the other guests, and we were at their wedding so we had to invite them. But I've got a special table for people who had kids and regret it- if you want, I could put them there and give them a miserable time.’

You can't stay married to someone for ever just because they climb out of your attic one afternoon.

She's been too vague in her search, too unclear about what she wants from a husband. It's time to focus. No swingers. No am-dram enthusiasts. No open-mouth chewers. Just a nice man to keep for a week and take to a wedding.

Okay. She tells too-clean husband that she's going out for a walk, and heads away from the railway station and up the hill to the park, where she dodges happy families and dog-walkers, heads to the lake, looks at ducks. She's vague on the details of duck mating but she knows it's unpleasant and involves a corkscrew-shaped penis, so arguably things could be worse.

They laugh. ‘Yeah, sometimes I turn up and someone speaks to me in French and I go straight back into the attic. Honestly, I should just learn - I did try but every time I change worlds all my Duolingo progress resets.’

This is so true it made me laugh out loud!

They get a weekly veg box which is great in theory but in practice she doesn't always want to tackle a knobbly celeriac or hyperspecific squash.

On the sixth of January she leans over in bed and kisses him, and grabs his hair, and he pulls her on top of him and laughs, and she rolls them both back the other way, and as the morning proceeds she discovers that in this world she owns, and uses during sex, a vibrator. She doesn't quite take to it, but there's no denying its efficiency, the pressure cooker of orgasms. Perhaps, like a pressure cooker, it takes practice to get the best out of it.

Anyway, you can't send a husband back because he makes you too good. Especially not a husband who - she doesn't love him, not yet, but she likes seeing him when she gets home, she likes lying in bed with him, the sex now that she's got used to their range of equipment is excellent, if on the serious side, and she even likes it when he shows her a paragraph from some informative article he's reading. She wants to be better for him, for this life they've made.

In a nearby bar she discovers the differences between the tedious London craft beer scene and the tedious Denver craft beer scene, namely (1) people in the US will try to have conver- sations with you even if they're not trying to pick you up, and (2) the beer contains substantially more alcohol, so perhaps you will let them.

The Husbands quotes

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