"Finger envoys" by Kik Lodge

I don’t like the way my wife eats toast. I tell her this because it’s important. I say no rush, babe! Slow down the frantic crunching! Fuck you, she replies and takes her toast to the toilet. She breezes back in and brings up the rainy day we went to the aquarium in Plymouth when she kept having to pull my elbows off the railing and move me on. You spent so long looking at each stupid species! What’s that got to do with toast? She always does this. I talk about something I deem important, then she unearths a random artefact and gets flustered and woe-be-me and all I can do is stare. And so she stays still and breathes, then invariably removes a piece of her clothing. As if this is going to solve everything. As if I'm going to forget the original impulse by seeing her belly sway to some silent bass that bores into the marrow of me as her long buttery fingers slide down her gym shorts, beckoned by something beyond us, beyond our petty domestics, finger envoys sent from somewhere behind time to say you sodding useless mortals you. As if.

Kik Lodge is a short fiction writer from Devon, England, but she lives in France with a menagerie of kids, cats and wabbit. When she is not writing, she is not exercising either. Her flash collection Scream If You Want To is out with Alien Buddha Press. Erratic tweets @KikLodge