Disillusion

I woke up Thursday night to my bedmate making a sound, so loud and so strange that it woke both of us up.

"Was that you?" I trembled in the asking.

"Uhm, yes," he replied--I have to give you a clue now--with a sheepish smile.

Then he burrowed his head back into his pillow and was back asleep soon enough. Not I.

I lay there in the dark, thinking: My tough Camarguais, my real man, the guy I have to admit I married partly because I was tired of having to deal with mere boys, and this one seemed so alpha male, the lion at the head of the pack, in the middle of the night, at REM time (rapid eye movement, not the band), he doesn't growl and neither does he snarl. Instead, he dreams that he is cattle, and moos like a cow.