Bill Bailey's Wife

When Bill Bailey didn’t come home Mrs. Bailey was beside herself; so beside herself that she kept bumping into herself. She bumped into the wall, the chair, the woodstove, the onion-board, the salt-rack, the doorjamb (twice) the wainscoting round the larder-door, the window ledge and herself. Who is this Mrs. Bailey? More so, who gives a rat’s ass who she is? Bill Bailey’s wife is no one; she is an apparition, a ghostly specter, not quite a person, person. She lives in the blank-slate of the author’s thoughts. Outside, beyond the page, the whiteness of the page, she is nothing, a specter. She is more an Italics than a person, a thing, a person with a body, thoughts, corporeality. She, his wife, Bill Bailey’s wife (Mrs. Bailey) is nothing and everything, the beginning and the end, the middle and the in between, the outside and the inside. She exists both inside and outside thought, on the whiteness of the page, scrawled on the blank-slate of the author’s tableau.