Add water and grow your own husband, it says in capital letters on the box above the made in China stamp. Day one a seed, a little plastic form no bigger than your little fingernail. Day two he sprouts arms and legs and grows an inch. A little anaemic: place him on the window sill in the sun and submerge him, ignore the choking gasping panic of drowning you imagine he feels, your miniature fiance in his watery glass prison. Day three, a smile a shock of jet black hair. His skin pressed against the inside of the glass, waxy pale and plastic still, bubbles rising from his tiny gaping mouth.
Day four the woman from next door comes in for tea. She has not seen you for days and thought (you think) maybe you are lying on the black and white chessboard of your kitchen, decomposing slowly. (Six bottles of milk on the doorstep, curdling slowly, and your post on the doormat.) Her hair from across the table smells of coconut milk and pineapple chunks, and after a little while she leaves, inevitably, falsely breezily. She says nothing about the tumbler-sized man packed uncomfortably tight into his cylindrical glass space, making O shapes with his mouth up at her from the mahogany top of the coffee table, where you placed him earlier. The cocktail scent of her hair lingers for two days.
Days five and six you watch him growing from the tumbler. Shedding glass shards he expands upward and outward rapidly, like the timelapse video of a sprouting sunflower they made you watch in primary school, right before you grew your own. He makes noises as he grows, waterlogged wood creaking as it dries. Stretches vowel sounds with his new tongue, aaaaeeeeeiiiioooouuuuuu. The woman from next door calls through the letterbox, and you clasp your hand over his mouth. Shhh, you say, his open lips and the shape of his teeth against the palm of your hand.
Day seven he clambers stiffly from the coffee table where you have been watching him sleeping standing, naked, bends rigidy at the knee and says, will you marry me?
