HONORABLE MENTION, Summer 2023
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY KATHRYN PRATT RUSSELL
When my husband took me to one of his regular pickup places, I was surprised. I’d thought it would be a college bar where they played Benatar to appeal to Gen Z vintage fans who liked to think that middle-class young people still borrowed cigarettes. Instead, it was a coffee bar, with a grungy restroom for all genders. One of the workers, not so much a barista as just the counter girl, looked at him full in the face as she sidled by us, then halfheartedly wiped down a faux marble table. I knew she was one of them, the conquests, if you could call them that. I felt like I was making headway in solving a puzzle: why was such a normal man, average in facial features, height, and even sexual prowess (as I understood it, anyway) able to recruit large numbers of women as willing bed partners?
She was young and attractive, that was true, but she seemed less than confident, completely focused on surreptitiously tracking his movements as he waited for his order. She was lurking over behind the espresso machine now, biding her time, and obviously he must have told her that he had a woman who had failed to satisfy his needs, but was still paying for the apartment he lived in with her.
Where did they do it then? Mattresses in storerooms, desks in closed offices (although there weren’t many of his girls who were old enough and advanced enough in work to have a key to the office). He hadn’t come right out and told me the details—he had just informed me that it was time that we went polyamorous. In fact, I was the one who needed to accept the news, because he had already been seeing others for several years.
It took a day for me to respond to him—I was too brokenhearted to look at him. Then, I asked him, How could you have done this without me noticing? He didn’t explain, but his silence provoked me into terrible thoughts. I remembered how his parents said almost nothing at the dinner table for the past twelve years of our marriage, letting him explain everything about his latest career advances, and the responses of influential people he had contacted for help. I thought they simply had no conversation, and no interest in talking to me.
After his revelation and ultimatum, his sweet, open face looked the same as before, but I could see that whatever his mind was doing, his face covered it like a cheap party mask. Even now, waiting for his entranced inamorata to bring his Americano, he was focused on neither of us. She, though, retained her weird, fixed but indirect attention on him. I was simply no longer there for her, if I ever had been.
When Lea got into my Altima a few days later, she had the slightly scary-eyed look of a person with bipolar disorder who has gone off her meds. She had texted me her address and told me it was an emergency. Shutting the passenger door, she turned and made reluctant eye contact before announcing that her very recent marriage was over. She couldn’t really look too long at any one place or plane of vision, and she asked if she could stay on our couch for a few days until she fixed her bank account and made long-term plans. Although I was a little surprised at this new level of intimacy, I decided to help her, since Lea had been teaching for just a couple of years, and she had a great reputation with her students. I was proud of what she’d accomplished since leaving my class six years ago. And I had an idea that I could help her somehow.
My husband, of course, was off doing whatever (or whomever) he did during the day when I unlocked the door and brought Lea into the entrance hall of our building. She was still fluttering her fingers gently against each other as she followed me into the galley kitchen and accepted a glass of sparkling water. I’d only seen her this unsettled once before—a couple years ago, when she was asking me what made a man worth staying with. Then, I thought she took what she wanted from my response and used it to get a wedding dress and a stable life, at the expense of adventure and a deep love.
What did I know, even if now her marriage had failed as I predicted? There was something I’d thought of, that I hadn’t remembered clearly before, that could bring her out of this dangerous anxiety without a therapist or meds. I could give her to my husband. What I haven’t admitted yet is that after he told me that he wanted an open relationship, even when I couldn’t look at him, he had laid his hand on me, and it warmed me like a fire in a cold climate. I couldn’t look, but I touched him back, and I slouched down underneath him like a half-empty sack. I couldn’t look, but I could feel him, everywhere, even on parts where he wasn’t touching me. Afterward, I was calm, as if far below the surface in frigid water, protected from seeing, hearing, or feeling anything in the still deeps.
She stopped fluttering when he came through the door. I told her to lie back on the couch. She didn’t look at him, but I could feel her watching him come in, and she twisted to shrug her sweater down off her shoulders as she lay there. He didn’t look at either of us, but he unbuckled his belt and slowly pulled it out through the loops. Then he told me that I should go into the kitchen. I went in there and sat down with my back against the cabinets, the ones I was paying for, and everything was okay.
Kathryn Pratt Russell has poems published or forthcoming in Gargoyle, Black Warrior Review, Chelsea, Red Mountain Review, Free State Review, Atlanta Review, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. Her prose and essays have appeared in American Book Review, Studies in Romanticism, Disappointed Housewife, Romantic Circles, and Studies in English Literature. Her poetry chapbook, Raven Hotel, was published by Dancing Girl Press in July 2021. She teaches at Clayton State University near Atlanta.
