Take action lickety-split upon noticing his shirt smells of hussy.
Follow that snake when he slithers out the door. Instead of the country bar, he heads to the new wine bar — the one you and your friends have been calling the whine bar. Sure enough, he sidles off to a lone table and sits across from some skanky ho with party tits. In front of her is a plus-sized glass of something the shade of ruby slippers. Tell the waiter you’ll have one of those.
Take a slurp, find it bitter.
The vixen, she reaches into her bitch bag and takes out a pair of ugly glasses like those worn by every child who ever got picked on at school. And then she places a book — the thick, hardbound variety — on the table.
How can it be that your rat takes the exact same book from his backpack?
Now another couple approaches and you have a squeamish feeling. Your man has never been into kinky, except for occasionally asking to leave the lights on. The new couple don’t really look like swingers either. The man’s shirt is so rumpled, looks like he just hauled it out of the laundry hamper. But so confident, so cool, acts like he owns the joint as he orders two glasses of champagne. Who orders champagne on a Monday night? By the glass? He helps the woman out of a plum-coloured shawl, as if he’s unwrapping a gift. Holds her chair as she sits, one hand placed ever so gently on her shoulder. Takes two copies of that same book from a worn suede satchel. Is it a cult of some kind? Is the book smutty?
When the plum princess speaks, the other three set their drinks down and listen. You can’t remember the last time he paid such close attention to you. You flex your ears, turning them into nets that catch the floating words of the conversation: character, empathy, human condition.
This is nothing like what you’d expected. But they do leave together, ratsnake and Double D. Not hand in hand. Just walking out the door at the same time. You toss back that fermented grape juice, resenting the fifteen bucks, and follow.
They part at the corner, and you trail him for another block. Right through the doors of the public library, a building you haven’t entered since you were maybe ten years old. And immediately you think that smell, what you thought must be the whiff of hussy, was actually the scent of paper.
You lurk behind shelves so high they were surely designed for the purpose of spying. He chooses three books and takes them over to the desk.
And when he has gone, you approach the librarian to ask for a card of your own. Also, what would she recommend to get started? Is there a book that works like a prescription to make a person more interesting? You’re asking for a friend.
Debbra Mikaelsen lives in a small town at the southern end of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, where she is not working on a novel. She has had short stories published in a few magazines, including Event, Storyteller, and Mslexia. In 2024 she won first prize at the 26th Annual Okanagan Short Story Contest.
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