The Best American Short Stories® 2011 by Geraldine Brooks

no more pride or direction than that of a faint but definite light. His refusal to grant her, and their child, that tiny, private awareness seemed to her insane.
    Since their first argument, she had found herself doing and thinking things that she previously never could have envisioned: feeling unfamiliar pangs while eating pork, writing
G-d
instead of
god
in e-mails, sneering at strangers' pendant crucifixes, resenting churches, discovering within herself an out-of-nowhere identification with A Certain Small Country She Had Never Been To And Did Not Ever Want To Visit. She had no explanation for these things.
    They stood holding each other's hand outside the cheese store. There seemed no place for this already battle-weary argument to go, other than deeper into a bunker, where it might just as well blow its own brains out. Suddenly she was crying. His forehead lurched forward, lightly bumping hers. "Don't cry," he said.
    She shook her head. "I feel like I've disappointed you in a way I can't even control."
    "I'm not disappointed. Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ayn Rand. This is not disappointment. This is something we can get through."
    "But what if we can't?"
    "Then I guess it's a bridge under water."
    At the same time they squeezed each other's hand. His brother, a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, had over the last five years of his eventful service become quite a collector of military-grade phraseology:
unimprovised road, northeasterlyward, shrapmetal, validify
, and
increasely.
"A bridge under water," which a gunnery sergeant had once used to describe to her husband's brother a particularly bad Ramadi neighborhood, was, as her husband knew, her personal favorite. She loved his brother.
    She hugged him now with real love, its smoldering edges suddenly extinguished. "I hope it's not a bridge under water. It would be a real blow to my parade if it were."
    His arms reached around her back. When he spoke into her hair his voice was unfamiliarly husky. "No need to reinvent the clock."
     
    When they reached their room she slept in her clothes for the rest of the afternoon and awoke around seven to find him writing in His Notebook. She admired that about him too. He could write anywhere. He claimed to have once written an entire op-ed in the bathroom at a friend's birthday party. But she knew that he had not been writing much lately. He told her a while ago that he felt convinced the time of the American voice was over, which sounded even more pretentious when he said it.
    She watched him for a little while, then said, "Hey," a drowsy creak in her voice breaking the word in two. "What are you doing?"
    "Writing," he said.
    "I gathered. What about?"
    "A monkey with an unusual level of curiosity. This gets him into trouble in the short term but consistently results in long-term gains for those around him. I think this is due to the purity of his motivation, though I have to admit, I'm just getting to know the character."
    When he got like this she really enjoyed throwing things at him and now launched across the room her big supernaturally downy pillow. He absorbed the blow and continued writing. She sat up and looked around the room, which was absurd, beginning with the fact that it did not have a number but rather a symbol. (The floors did not have numbers either; they had colors; they were on Green.) Their room's symbol resembled a Celtic cross. Upon check-in, they had been given a sheet with peel-away representations of this symbol, which they were supposed to affix to all relevant bills. It was apparently some sort of "art hotel," and everything in the room had a gadgety double function. The shower's clear glass door turned discreetly opaque when the water was running. The wall-hung flat-screen television could be pulled out from its steel rigging on some sort of extender arm and angled this way or that, allowing guests to see the screen from literally any point in the room. The day they arrived they had