Or Just a Little Regret
In a moment of intimacy in a downtown hotel, lying on a bed with covers pushed to the floor, Vadim said to Tara, “Do you swim?” He lifted his hand from her belly as he spoke, feeling his shoulder ache slightly. Why should a man who was only thirty-seven have shoulder pain?
“A little,” she said, taking his hand and laying it back on her belly. “But I’m afraid of the water.” She liked Vadim, with his thick wild hair and his thick wild accent, and she wanted him to continue lying beside her, softly stroking her body as he murmured in Russian. Milochka he said. Whatever that meant, it sounded nice.
After making love twice, they sat nude by the huge window on the twentieth floor, with glasses of wine, looking down at the lights of Atlanta scattered across the dark sea of night.…
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I scrubbed bits of egg off a fork from my father’s uneaten breakfast before mother found out he failed to rinse the utensil before placing it in the sink. The sky outside the kitchen window was flat and gray, like a piece of spoiled meat. The air inside was oppressive and stifling, much like the rasp of my father’s breathing. His slippers shuffled against the carpet, and I heard the clank of a spoon against ceramic. Before I could volunteer to get the bowl, it hit the floor with a thud. Then his cough came on suddenly; violent and wet as though a tornado ripped through his lungs. I watched him from the entrance to the living room, my toes breaching the marble room divider he installed when I was in middle school. …
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The devil sat staring out of the window of his second hand bookstore and prayed that if he did get any customers that morning they wouldn’t be one of those Trump supporting MAGA hat wearing American tourists he’d been seeing jostling for position to get into St Peter’s recently. Sweet Christ, the irony of it he groaned as he lit his first joint of the day. Black Spy Books was less well known for its reputation among high and low brow bibliophiles alike, as it was an excellent place to score top quality weed. The prince of darkness himself was a tidy looking man who many claimed to be the spitting image of T.S. Eliot. Checking his WhatsApp there were no messages. Cy/Cyr/Cyr’s timestamp read currently online, but then Cy/Cyr/Cyr was always online.…
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“Last night? I dreamt of something called Competitive Nut. You go into a store with an exotic nut, bring a few in a little box,” I explained. “They clean them off for you… to your specifications of course… and you eat it.”
“What do you mean by exotic?” She gave me a smile. “Maybe because I was there?”
“No,” I said. “You weren’t there.”
I remembered another dream from since I had last seen her. It was at work, in her office, but she wasn’t in that one either. Instead, a kid I’d grown up with and who I hadn’t thought about in a long time was in the dream, working where she worked, her office, at her white board.
“OK, my turn,” she said. “We’re at a country club, playing golf. …
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When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers.
Oscar Wilde
The Senior Center science class softened my recent widowhood—we read ScienceNews, a weekly magazine filled with mid-level science sophistication. The class offered me structure and companionship.
The medical section was placed after the astronomy update that explained the expanding universe and the ripples in spacetime caused by colliding black holes. We often skipped the ripples and jumped to the human evolution side of history, especially our interactions with our Neanderthal cousins, who ruled the planet for 100,000 years before we nudged them out of existence. Next came the article about a new drug for the treatment of progeria. The story caught my attention, like spotting the first hummingbird of spring kissing my trumpet honeysuckles.…
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The man who was probably hitting on her was more handsome than Lexie first thought, though wildly age-inappropriate. He had a combination of features striking on males of any age, but especially agreeable on the seasoned – prominent brow, deep-set, lively eyes, sharp jaw that shot straight back like the steel bow of a battleship, and a smile both boyish and sophisticated. If twenty, he could be shirtless in a jeans ad but the lines cut by experience and the abrasions of weather edged him toward iconic. He was nicely dressed too, but it was his cool that made Lexie think. He pulsed it like someone called a cool guy all his life, who is used to things coalescing around him as the magnetic center, but doesn’t work hard at it or give it much thought. …
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Steven stepped out of his house onto the porch into the cool morning air. The sun was just coming up and the darkness was receding, giving the neighborhood a blue hue. He put his hands on his hips and stretched back slightly, easing sleep from his muscles. He was a little sore from pickleball the other night, but that’s how he and his buddies stayed in shape at their advanced age.
He took a few casual glances down the street and saw a woman rounding the corner, likely on her morning walk. She didn’t look familiar to him.
As he shuffled down the drive to pick up his newspaper, Steven pulled his phone out of his sweatpants pocket. The woman was slowly making her way closer.…
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