The following is an excerpt from “Portalmania,” a fictional book of short stories by Debbie Urbanski. It was originally published in “The Sun” magazine.

“What would I have to look like for you to want me?” my husband asks. “What if I looked like a bird? You like birds. You’re always watching them at the feeder.”

My husband is persistent with his questions. He asks, “What if there were a magic pill that would make you want me? Would you be willing to take it?”

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I have told my husband that he can leave me, but he doesn’t believe in divorce.

These days all we do is ask questions the other person can’t answer.

He asks, “Why couldn’t you keep pretending?”

He asks, “What if you’re only pretending not to want me now?”

We have known each other more than half our lives—unless, that is, we are only pretending to know each other.

He asks, “Do you still like kissing me?”

Later, over tea, my husband returns to this concept of a pill. He’s become obsessed with the idea of a single miraculous cure that could heal our problems as if we were characters in a fantasy story. Or would it be science fiction? I suppose it depends on how the pill is made. To complicate matters, we have two young children. My husband likes to remind me that the children of divorced parents have a higher incidence of drug abuse and may perform poorly in school.

During our compromised moments in bed—when we are not having sex but doing something else, the particulars of which I don’t want to describe right now—I have begun to wonder: What if a doorway opened up, a portal to take me out of this life? What if I were a character in a story in which that happened? Would I get up from the bed, leaving my naked husband and my children behind, and enter that other world? This is what I think about when my husband has made me remove my clothes and has taken my legs and wrapped them around his waist. I like the story better than I do my life. I guess that is why I’m a writer. My husband leans down and licks my neck, his tongue moving toward my ear. To be honest, it feels like a dog is licking me, and I don’t like dogs. But I would never tell him this.

When we first met in college, I saw my life as a stage upon which I tried to act like the other people I knew. It took me a long time to understand how to do it correctly. Right now I am in the process of ruining certain lives, specifically my husband’s and my own.

“What you’re saying is this pill would make me a different person,” I tell my husband. “So you want to know if I’ll become a different person for you?” It seems a fair question.

In college my husband was a sweet, often drunk kid who liked bands incapable of melody. He also liked frequent sex. We had sex after dinner every night if he wanted to, and again in the morning if I slept at his apartment. I’ve spent more time looking at his face than I have looking at my own.

“Why don’t you go ahead and cut my penis off with a knife?” he said recently in one of his darker moods. I told him maybe that would help our situation. I was joking, of course, but he didn’t find it funny. Honestly, neither did I. My refusal to have sex must be difficult to understand if you belong, as my husband does, to the roughly 99 percent of the population for whom intercourse is a necessity or at least an urge. There is a chance my husband may never have sex again because of me. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s life.

My husband asks, “Why couldn’t you have figured this out before we had children?”

We are at a crossroads, the kind every couple approaches now and then. I picture some bucolic countryside where the well-graded paths branch out in numerous directions, and there are grazing cows and helpful signposts. My husband and I are standing there, and I am making it clear to him, through my body language and hand gestures, that he is free to go in any direction he chooses. It’s not like I have a leash attached to his collar. It’s not like I make him wear a collar. He can select any one of these paths. He can take me with him or not. If he does not take me with him, there are several overgrown paths I can choose on my own. I don’t know where our children are in this picture. Will there be child-sized paths for them, leading to water parks? Or must we cut our children in half and each keep a part? In any case, I urge him to ignore the trails that lead to the cliffs and look instead at all the other paths rambling downhill to welcoming villages, fulfilling futures.

My husband asks, “Did you know before we had children, but you didn’t tell me because you didn’t want to be alone?”

He acted like it was a turn-on at first. I remind him of this now—how, after I told him, he said, “Oh, my little asexual” and pushed his pelvis against mine as we stood beside the dirty stove in the kitchen, as if not understanding the definition of the word. It was only after a few weeks that he grew frightened and withdrawn. Then came the period in which he wanted to discuss my “condition” whenever the kids were in bed and we were alone.

“Can we please talk about something else?” I asked.

He did not want to talk about something else. He wanted to know what he was supposed to do with me after a romantic dinner. “We come home and then . . . what? You go upstairs and read?”

“I like reading,” I told him.

“You like reading more than sex?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Still, one’s needs must be met—or, at least, my husband’s needs must be. “I will go crazy if we don’t do anything in bed,” he confessed, dragging me through many awkward conversations about what I was or was not willing to do within my new identity. Somehow we stumbled upon certain accommodations, which I guess are what prevents him from going crazy. For my husband it remains an act of love, what he’s doing to me once a week, while I think this is what it must feel like to be molested.

“Look at me,” my husband demands. He likes me to at least look at him, but if he would allow me to turn my head to the bedroom wall, I might see the hopeful suggestion of a light from some faraway place. I am aware of the problems with such a plot: that the laws of physics say we can’t step through some imagined doorway into another world; that there probably are no other worlds. But for the moment, please put aside your need for realism and let me believe in this.

Excerpted from PORTALMANIA by Debbie Urbanski. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Debbie Urbanski is the author of the novel “After World.” Her stories and essays have been published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, she can often be found hiking with her family in the hills south of Syracuse, New York. She is still looking for her portal.

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