Boob Tube
by Jennifer Braunfels
The subject of my husband remarrying after I die comes up a lot. In fact, we talked about it again the other night while binge-watching one of our favorite shows. The series is a loop of killings and drug deals. However, the part that intrigues me the most is the relationship between the husband and wife. Well, that and the wife’s boobs.
The wife on the show is gorgeous. She’s thirty-something with toned arms and long, rolling curls of blond hair. And thick pink lips. I talk about her boobs a great deal because it’s all I seem to talk about lately. Her breasts are fairly normal, but what I obsess over is the way they sometimes spill up and out when she wears any top with a V-neck. I look down at my B-cup implants. I know I should be grateful to be alive, but I miss my old breasts. Sure, they were saggy, but they had character. These new gals just sit. No bounce. No jiggle. No spilling up and over when I wear something low-cut. I turn to my husband, sitting in the recliner, and ask, “Do you think she’s good looking?”
My husband looks out the window. It’s raining again. He turns back to me. “Yes. She’s gorgeous. Don’t you think so?”
Heat flashes up my cheeks. “No. I think she’s ugly.”
“What? You think she’s ugly?”
He leans over and reaches toward me. I slink out of his reach. “I think you have terrible taste in women. You pick ugly ones every time.”
I roll over on the couch so that my back is to him.
“Jenny. Come on,” he pleads.
I lie on my side. Stare at the boob tube. On the show, someone just got shot in the head, leaving a gaping hole. I reach up to scratch a phantom itch on my side. My fingers skim over the scar where the surgical drains were. I’d never heard the term surgical drain care before my mastectomy. How many times did I get tangled up in those fourteen-inch tubes? On screen, the two main characters are cleaning up bloody, fleshy chunks. Body parts. Reminds me of the postsurgical protocol. Strip the junk from the tubes into the clear plastic bulbs that look like grenades pinned to the post-surgery bra. Pull the pin. Empty the reservoir. Record what you see. Serous fluid, blood, and tissue strands. Repeat four times a day. When the wife appears in the next scene, I hoist myself up on an elbow.
This series is new to my husband, but I’ve watched it from start to finish twice already, so I already know the ending. This time around, the show has been a great distraction. Well, it’s a great distraction for both my husband and me. Even though it’s been one year since my diagnosis, and I’ve had countless rounds of chemo, surgeries, radiation, and injections, I now have to have MRIs done every three months to make sure the cancer is staying away. Last week, I had to have a second round of scans because the first set showed a growth on my tailbone, and the type of breast cancer I had comes back as bone cancer. Waiting for the results of these latest scans has been agonizing.
In this episode, the wife wears a green blouse with a white tank top underneath. The top three buttons of the blouse are undone. She’s suspicious of her husband. She thinks he’s smoking pot. Poor thing has no clue about all the sinister things he’s been up to.
The husband on the show has cancer, and this is my first time viewing the series post-diagnosis and treatment. I’m interested to see how realistic the cancer plotline is. Of course, the main character is a man, so they won’t show him going through chemo-induced menopause. He won’t endure painful sex, hot flashes, or weight gain. I wonder if men in treatment lose their libido, too. I’m sure they’ll show him shitting his brains out. But how will they ever be able to portray how much everything always hurts? And how every single thing you do makes you unbearably tired. Walking. Talking. Anything. How can a show ever truly illustrate just how mentally and physically disempowered and vulnerable cancer makes you?
We have time for a second episode. The wife’s suspicion is growing. She knows her husband isn’t telling her something. She’s wearing a shirt that’s snug over her breasts but then flares out. Her husband comes home. Says he was working late. But she’s already talked to his boss and knows he quit weeks ago.
I reach up and touch my implants. The left one is always cold. I glance over at my husband. He winks at me and smiles. Before all of this, we did the thing that all married couples do. We got comfortable. We both packed on a few pounds. I stopped shaving my legs as often. I even skipped brushing my teeth before bed some nights. But it was all okay because we were in love and would be together forever, and he would adore me no matter how I looked, just like the husband and wife on this program. But then came the double mastectomy and the year of all the things.
The episode ends. A real cliffhanger. “Are you up for another one?” my husband asks.
I look down at my watch. “Sure. Why not.”
The next episode begins with the wife sitting and smoking at their kitchen table. Her brows are furrowed. It’s her husband’s first day of chemo. She drums her long pink fingernails on the tabletop. The top three buttons of her blouse are undone, exposing a tank top. The blouse is blue; the tank top is black.
I mean, my husband still loves me. That hasn’t changed. He still introduces me as his beautiful wife. But still, you have to wonder if love really runs that deep. My long brown curls have been replaced by gray fuzz. All of my muscle was gobbled up by the chemo. I’ve put on even more weight. And he says he loves the implants, but neither of us has quite figured out what to do with them yet.
The scene switches. The husband sits in a chair in a room full of cancer patients. All the characters are hooked up to IVs. “They’ve got it all wrong,” I say aloud. “It looks like those IV bags are filled with piss. It’s not like that. Most chemo meds are clear. Remember?”
My husband leans over and rubs my arm.
The scene flashes forward to the husband taking a shower a few days later. He’s lathering his head with shampoo, and when he goes to rinse, his hair falls out in clumps. The wife is nowhere in sight. For me, it was exactly two weeks after my first chemo infusion that my hair fell out. I was in front of the bathroom mirror. I’d run some gel through my hair, and when I pulled my hands away, there was hair in my fingers. Lots of it. So, I left the clumps on the countertop by the sink. In the show, the character stares at the hair draped over his hands while water runs down his body. I close my eyes. Curl my hands into fists and then open them again. I can still feel the locks of hair between my fingers. I open my eyes. “Remember that?”
I stare straight ahead and try to focus on the show, but my mind flips back to that morning when I shaved my head. My husband was already at work, so I sent him a picture of the tangle of hair on the vanity. “Here we go,” I texted. And then I did what you do: I shaved my head. Alone. In the bathroom. Feeling numb. Watching my long brown strands fall to the tile floor. Watching like it was a television show or a movie. Something happening to someone else.
Richard reaches over and holds onto my hand. He starts blinking, which he does when trying not to cry.
“And now look. You’re stuck with this,” I say as I tug at my short, gray curls. Tears fill my eyes. As I pull my hand away, one of my chipped fingernails snags on my hair. “Goddammit.”
One of my chemo meds makes your fingernails peel and split even months after treatment has ended. I bring my fingers to my mouth and nibble at the jagged corner of one of my nails. On our show, the wife walks across the frame. She and her husband are having troubles. I look at her and point, and then point at myself. “See, you do like ugly women.”
It’s a few days and a few episodes later. Still no word on my scans. The husband is puking in a stall at the school where he teaches. I never barfed where I teach, although I did have to run to the staff bathroom several times a day because of the diarrhea, but I never threw up. The husband wipes his mouth with a rough, dull, brown industrial paper towel by the sink. The custodian appears behind him and hands him a stick of gum.
Later in the episode, there’s a plot twist. The wife tells the husband she’s having an affair. I glance over at my husband. His mouth hangs open. “Jesus. I never thought she’d do that,” he says. “Maybe she’s not so pretty after all.”
I pull my glasses down lower on my nose. “Still think she’s sexy now?”
“Christ. Is she going to end up with that guy if the cancer kills her husband?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Just tell me,” he implores.
“You’re just going to have to wait and see,” I say, wagging my finger.
I know that the husband dies in the last episode, but I’ll continue to play dumb for now. And then, even though I know better, I ask my husband the inevitable: “What about you?”
Richard leans over. “What’s that?”
“After. If I die, will you shack up with someone like her?” I point in the direction of the television.
I know I shouldn’t talk like this. My diagnosis and treatment sent me into this whole other world where my identity was changed beyond recognition. The world I returned to was so much different than I expected, and I was left with crippling anxiety, a fear of dying, and dangerously low self-esteem. I spend large amounts of time hating how I look and wondering what will happen to Richard and the kids when I’m gone.
It’s the most helpless feeling. Imagining what their lives will look like without me in it.
My husband’s smile goes away. “I’ve already told you. I’m never going to be with anyone else.”
“Yeah, right,” I say, and chuck a throw pillow at him.
He catches it and tosses it back. “It’s true. You’re my girl. If anything happened to you, which it won’t, that’s it for Dicky. I’d be alone forever.”
I chuckle. “As if. You’d find some young thing with long hair and real big boobs.”
He slits his eyes at me. “I’m telling you. You could divorce me tomorrow, and I’d still never be with anyone else.”
“But I would want you to. I don’t want you to be lonely. Why don’t you marry Erin? She’s nice. She’s funny.”
I’m smiling. Richard is not. He hates this game. “Look, nothing will happen to you, so I don’t even know why we’re discussing this.”
He picks up the remote and turns the volume up on the television. I roll over.
On the screen, there’s more sex between the wife and her boss. My husband nudges me with his foot. I look over, and he licks his lips seductively. He’s trying to be funny. Lighten the mood. He loves to make me laugh.
The scene switches to two of the bad guys. Twins. They’re evil as hell, and they’re out for revenge. As he walks, one of the brothers drags an ax along the tar at his heel. He wears pointy cowboy boots with skulls on them that remind me of my oncologist's slim-toed shoes. I look over at my husband. “Because I want you to know that I’d want you to remarry if something—”
Richard throws his arms up in the air. “Jen. Stop. Please.”
He blinks a few times. Lifts the remote. Pauses the program.
“Well, I just wouldn’t want you to be alone. That’s all.” I look at him. Really take him in. He’s fifty, but he’s still strikingly handsome. Piercing blue eyes. Rugged, wide jawline. Muscular arms. He works out at the gym every day after work. Just the other day, a coworker of mine commented on his dimples.
“It would just be a shame to waste that good-looking body on yourself for the rest of time, is all I’m saying.”
“You’re not going anywhere. I couldn’t live without you. And besides, you’re going to be fine.”
When I look back at the show, the brothers with the ax are gone. Now, the wife is staring at herself in the bathroom mirror. She wears a fluffy white robe. Her lover is in the shower. She’s having second thoughts about the affair. When she sees that some of her cleavage is showing, she pulls the robe closed and knots the belt.
My husband still has no clue that the main character dies in the last episode. When the series ends, the cancer is about to get him, but that’s not what takes him out. It’s a gunshot wound. He decides to go out in a blaze of glory. He leaves a bloody handprint on the side of a metal tank before falling to the ground and bleeding out. But my husband’s still got it in his head that the cancer will be cured. He thinks the wife will take the husband back, and that they’ll live happily ever after.
We finished another whole season last week and started this new one. The last one. Tonight, the wife wears a fairly ordinary white blouse. She has a cream-colored cardigan over it. Her boobs sit up high. A lot has happened. She knows the truth about her husband and how dangerous he is. She’s slashing at the air in front of him with a knife from the kitchen. She’s crying, and her chin trembles as she speaks. My phone pings. My stomach turns. I swipe at the screen. A goodnight text from my oldest. I sigh. Reply with a heart emoji.
Now, the wife is running down the street. She’s screaming. Her boobs bounce.
“What episode is this?” I ask without taking my eyes off the wife’s breasts.
At the end of the block, the wife stops and stands there panting and shaking, her chest heaving. Then she drops to her knees in the middle of the street.
“Don’t know,” my husband says.
So I scroll on my phone for a while, looking up information on this last season. My heart thumps when I see that we’re only two episodes from the end of the series. My eyes well up again, and my throat closes up. I blurt out, “Let’s stop watching this. I’m bored. Let’s watch a comedy or something.”
My husband turns to me. “No way. Are you kidding me? We’ve made it this far. I have to see what happens.”
But then, before I can stop myself, I begin to cry. And I don’t exactly know why, but I can’t stop. And then that feeling in my chest grows, and I’m wailing. My husband jumps up, pauses the show, tosses the remote onto the recliner, and plops himself down beside me. Tears roll down my face in a steady stream. My body rocks.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” my husband asks.
I try to form words, but I can’t. I want to tell him that I wish I could freeze time. I want to pick up that clicker, hit stop, and never let the series finish. I want to tell him that I don’t want this to end. I want the husband and wife to live happily ever after. But I know that the final episode is coming soon, and I know my husband will be devastated. I just want so badly to spare him the pain of that tragic ending.
My husband holds me close. He leans into my face, strokes my cheek, and whispers, “It’s okay, Jenny. I swear it’s all going to be okay,” over and over.
Eventually, I’m able to regulate my breathing again. My husband wipes the remainder of my tears with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He kisses my lips and smiles. For one moment, things feel normal and calm again. But then my phone pings. I scramble to my feet and snatch my phone off the coffee table. A notification flashes on the screen. An email from New England Cancer Center. Richard stands behind me. Places a hand on my arm. My heartbeat pounds behind my ears, making it hard to hear anything.
Richard places his hands on my shoulders to steady me. I glance at the television one last time. Then I open the email and read it, but the whole time I’m scanning the words, I’m wondering if I’ll ever be able to find my way back to normal or if some small part of me, too, will forever be down on my knees, helpless in the middle of the street, mouth open, frozen, mid-scream.
Jennifer Braunfels was born and raised in Maine. Her first novel will be published in spring 2026 through Apprentice House Press. Her Chapbook, Reclamation Days, is a finalist in the 2024 Masters Review Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Whiskey Tit Journal, As You Were: The Military Review, Free Flash Fiction, and in other places. She lives with her husband, children, and unruly dog, Sissy.
Photo by Aleks Dorohovich on Unsplash