FICTION

A Nervous Tic Motion Kind of Peace

By Kim Samek     VOLUME 56 No. 2

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I first noticed something was off with Woody when he was fired from his job as a software engineer. His boss caught him asleep on his keyboard, his nose inserting random letters into the code. Just like that, Woody lost his job of six years. Luckily, I had a sympathetic manager who gave me extra shifts at the library, and I became the breadwinner.

Woody had always complained about his job—he found no joy in work. He wanted to be a musician but had never written a song, so he was biding his time working on website design for a company that sold earplugs. I hoped that he would enjoy taking over primary parent duties. But it turned out Woody wasn’t well-suited to look after our toddler either.

One day, I came home from work and found Sophie running loose in the front yard with her dirty diaper in hand, Woody nowhere to be found. We were lucky our daughter wasn’t pancaked in the street. She was already at an age where she could outrun us. I once tried slowing her down by putting her in drugstore jelly sandals, but she kicked them off and sprinted into traffic. Now I wore running shoes all the time in case I needed to take off after her.

I scooped Sophie up with one arm and went looking for Woody. I found him waist-deep in the dirt behind the rosebushes, stuck like the stubborn six-foot weeds that had invaded our yard. It took all my strength to pull him out of the ground. He insisted nothing was out of the ordinary, but he walked toward the house slower than usual.

“What’s going on?” I asked, concerned. “You seem a bit under the weather.”

“Just tired,” he replied. “No big deal.”

“Seems like more than that, no?” I asked.

He shrugged and fell asleep on the couch. When he got up two days later, his body left a large dent in the couch cushions, as though he weighed a thousand pounds. As he walked to the bathroom, his feet made permanent impressions on our wood floor. I told myself I was seeing things. We’d been living in a sleep-deprived state since our daughter was born. We were bound to experience a psychotic break. No one could live with this little sleep. I carried on with the chores and made dinner, sure the dents would go away once I got some rest.

A few days later, I was at work when the neighbor called to say Woody was stuck in the ground next to his mailbox. The neighbor had already dug him out and was taking him to the hospital to get checked out. I rushed to the emergency room and learned that my husband had been diagnosed with a classic case of Heavy Depression—an illness that made a person heavier and heavier until he sank into a grave made of his own steps. The doctor estimated he had only a few months to live, so we needed to act fast.

I enrolled him in the best inpatient lightening program I could find. The program claimed to have an 85 percent success rate in curing people with Heavy Depression. Supposedly, Woody would come out lighter in only one month. And it was a place that attracted creative types. Several Netflix shows had been written on the premises. A music festival had been hatched there too. Given Woody’s previous comments, I thought he might resist, but he agreed to treatment immediately. He said it would be a welcome break from parenting.

I understood what he meant. We lived in a state of disarray. The toilet paper was rarely spooled. The wicker storage baskets we bought to KonMari our lives had been emptied out and were now worn as hats. It had been several months since anyone had turned off the television.


In the morning, we drove to the hilltop facility in Malibu. It was more impressive than expected. Bigger than a high school—maybe the size of a tech campus—with glass walls and signs directing people to the theatre, the sauna, the dining room, the basketball court, the yoga annex, the meditation room, the garden, the greenhouse.

“You’re going to have a good time,” I told him.

“I bet there will be some interesting people,” he said.

“Do you think I’m interesting?” I asked.

“Of course you are,” he said, though he didn’t make eye contact.

I wanted to be mad at him, but all that mattered was fixing my husband. I needed him back. It was getting unmanageable to look after my daughter and husband while also trying to work enough to support the family.

Woody blew us kisses as he wheeled his luggage through the sliding glass doors. I may have imagined this, but he seemed to relax as soon as the glass doors closed and he could no longer hear Sophie’s screams.


When I returned a month later, I found Woody waiting for me outside the compound with a silly grin on his face. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen him smile so effusively. Maybe on our third date when he ordered a latte that came in a mug the size of his head. He said he had been grinning because he was imagining me as his wife. I was happy myself, thinking of those worry-free early days of our relationship, before we had a kid.

“So how was it?” I asked, loading his suitcase into the trunk. “You feel better now? Lighter?”

“All fixed,” he said, nodding. “You don’t have to worry about me sinking anymore. All of that dumb shit’s behind me for good.”

“Beautiful,” I said. “For that much money, it better have worked.”

I felt hopeful for the first time in months, but when we got home, Sophie slammed the front door shut and sent Woody floating through the living room like a tumbleweed. He had to grab a doorframe to keep from blowing away. Sophie was giggling as she batted her father around in the hallway.

“Daddy is not a toy,” I told her, gently pulling her away.

Woody didn’t seem bothered by his lightness and had the same latte-sized grin on his face that I was starting to hate.

“This is great,” he said as he looked down at his legs. “I’m so light! I’m barely anything! Nothing to worry about. I’m cured!”

He drifted away as he spoke. By the time he finished his thought, we were no longer in the same room.

What had they done to my beautiful husband?

I was careful not to show my fear to my family. I calmly went into the bedroom, shut the door, and gathered myself. The program must have miscalculated and made him too light. Surely there was an antidote?

I took a deep breath as I called the center. The receptionist put me on hold for what seemed like an eternity and then hung up. Next, I tried the doctor, but he had no useful information. He said the treatment center would know better than him what to do about an inappropriate dosage. He emphasized that it was a reputable program; he wouldn’t have recommended it otherwise. No one wanted to take responsibility for what happened to Woody.

I told my boss I was taking a leave of absence. He was less understanding than at the beginning of Woody’s crisis, but I didn’t have time to care. I needed to figure out how to keep my husband from blowing away. It took a bit of creative thinking, but I ended up tethering him to me like a weird balloon. All day, he floated along beside me, and at night, he slept shackled to the bed. When I went to the bathroom, I tied him to the doorknob so I could have a few minutes of privacy.

Most of the time, he floated gracefully just behind me, but sometimes we banged into each other and one of us would yell to knock it off. After a few weeks like this, I felt resentful about having no alone time, but I had to remind myself it wasn’t his fault he could float away. I was the one who had gotten him the bad treatment in the first place.

“You could untie me,” he said later, as we were eating dinner.

“But then you’d float away,” I told him.

“It’s the price one pays for freedom,” he said cryptically.

“I’m not letting you blow away,” I said. “You’re my responsibility.”

He tried to lead us into the kitchen. I decided to let him. He wanted Japanese milk bread toast with strawberry jam and a cup of Ovaltine. At least he still had an appetite.

“You ever feel like you have no idea how you got here?” he asked.

I shook my head, unsure of what he meant.

This wasn’t the life either of us had pictured, but all families did what was needed to get by.

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KIM SAMEK is a biracial Thai-American comedy writer and television executive producer. She studied creative writing at Stanford University and was a fellow at the Tin House 2020 novel workshop. Her short fiction appears in Catapult, Guernica, and Ecotone, and is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review. A native of Seattle, she calls Los Angeles home. She has completed a story collection and is working on a novel.


VOLUME 56 No. 2