Just Like That

 by Kurt Albert Splittorff

Arriving like a crepe-soled creeper, Edgar tapped gently on the door and she, with a fake whiskey voice pretending to be Rochelle Simonette the french actress, would say “come in” and he would place a trinket on the bureau, sniffing her Vol de Nuit as it pinged against the ancient voices wrapped in the curtains and she would wiggle like a worm as he placed another gift beneath her nose and looking down saw his fat cock swinging.

Roberta frowned on her way to the bath to get ready for her man whom she would dutifully dismiss with no more than a sneer if it were not for the gobs of money like stars falling into her private account, in Switzerland.

And dutiful husband would appear. No animosity, it was all courtesy and hunger for money and flesh; the perfect marriage. “We’re not sleeping together. He has the sciatica and the limp dick, he’s down the hall in Missy’s old room and oh I am so upset Marguerite, this is a poor martini! Why do we continue?”

“With the men, I know.”

“No love, this restaurant. Should have gone to the new Avenida Grill.”

“Who is Edgar seeing? Girl, boy or shemale?”

Bobbie roared, “Oh, you are a charm!”

“She is the devil”, Bobbie snorted while driving home. “Always has been. Tried to seduce Edgar when I cared, makes me bite my nails and want to smoke and I am talking to myself again.”

She lit a menthol. She began to sob on the Hutchinson River

Parkway. “Dr. Rosen? I want someone to feel me up like in high school without the fumbling and the frenzy and the faint smell of kishka; ‘I don’t want your mother Neil!’ He would laugh and hurry with such tiny feet for a man his size to the bath to gargle. I want a man I don’t care the age as long as he can hold his liquor, keep it up, tell his friends, oh hell at this point in life I demand it, a little gossip; ‘yeah, the broads’ alright Eugene, nice tits too’. Satisfy my needs at which Edgar has flopped and Marguerite in the friend department has flopped also; like I said, the devil.”

She flicked her cigarette out the window like some punk and said, “just like that.” Bobbie stood in the study with a gin martini properly made, watching the world dissolve and her photos fade. “When the kid…” She wobbled a bit. “I would tickle Missy and would she giggle? Show her off, squeeze those luscious sausage legs in Macy’s. Oh Christ I would be up nights with joy and no money thinking about her and everyone stopping to goo-goo at the baby because it’s fun.”

“Missy is gone before Edgar and I”, and looking to the photo of them in their red flannel shirts and squinting into the sunshine, “I think I will have one more martini. Just like that.”

End

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Kurt Albert Splittorff lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.