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. [continue reading…]
