noiragustin

The three of them went away alone, with suitcases full of tiny bikinis and a single intention. My wife said she’d tell me when she got back. And she certainly did.

I took off my sweatshirt on the stairs, waited to hear the shower running upstairs, and returned to the kitchen determined to stop that man from looking at the refrigerator.

I returned to the countryside after years in the city and, looking for my father among the corn, found my mother on her knees before one of his farmhands.

My husband was away again, and my back couldn’t take any more. My neighbor’s message said, “The first massage is free.” I never imagined how far it would go.

I thought I’d buried the woman who charged for her time. One offer from my own boyfriend was enough to wake her and take control of the night.

My friendship with that rough but good-natured old man took a turn one afternoon over wine in a lost village, when he whispered what he planned to do to me.

Every time she leaned over to write down my answers, her vest opened a little more, and I could no longer concentrate on a single question in the questionnaire.

When I climbed into the pickup with my unconscious boyfriend in the back seat, his father already had that smile of someone who knows exactly what’s about to happen.

She’d been married for twenty years to a man who prayed before every meal. That afternoon, under the park tree, she confessed who she truly missed.

It didn’t matter that he was thirty years older than me. With the sway of the road, his hand found my hip in the dark and I stopped pretending I didn’t like it.

At four in the morning, locked under the sheets with my mother’s phone, I started opening folder after folder, unaware that nothing would ever be the same.