by Jesse Raub

He heard the bottle in her right hand clink against the railing in perfect four-four time with the click of her heels on the wooden stairs.  He sighed and leaned back into the couch.

“I have to teach a class tomorrow,” he said to no one in the room.  The dog stirred in the corner.

Still, her heels connected with the cement floor and she turned the corner and clacked through the darkness towards him.   The dog lifted its head and set it back down on its front paws.

“It’s a very early class.”

She elongated her walk; her legs turned into a silhouette of the Rockettes – all of the Rockettes at once– in the dim yellow cone of light coming from the lamp on the short table.

Next to the lamp on the table sat a pack of cigarettes still wrapped in cellophane and a nameless book of poetry with an un-creased spine, the leather still fragrant with the incense from bookstore where he bought it.

She took another step, this time revealing the thigh length hem of a black silk dress.

He had no excuses left.

Her face still in the shadow, she could be anyone.

“Boom chicka boom,” she said with her hips.

His nostrils flared above his mustache and he drew in a deep breath.  The bottle in her right hand settled next to the book and the cigarettes on the table.  The three objects sat unused and watched with the routine uninterest that the graying yellow lab in the corner had become famous for.  The skirt of her dress covered his lap, her hips resting on his.  He tried to remember, as he undid his belt underneath her skirt, if Brenda ever tried to pull shit like this, and resorted to not caring.

“Third Wife No Better Than The First” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.