Three-Legged

What would’ve happened if we’d never met – only shared a glance and a smile across a packed auditorium, the fresh lacquer smell of the stage mingling with stale cigarette smoke? No locking hands across the ocean, no dewy-haired bairns. I might always have wondered how it would feel to touch your smooth chest slick with sweat in the still night, to hear your voice thrumming with want, feel your body vine around mine, fall into sleep already yearning for more.

What would’ve happened if we’d met a decade later on a ferry steaming across the Sound, diesel smoke descending in wafts, both of us hanging over the railing to feel the salt spray envelop us, the blast of the air horn making us both jump, laugh, at the same moment thinking, do I know you from somewhere?

What would’ve happened if we had met those many years ago – in a dim oak-paneled bar that smelled of whiskey and onions, Let’s Go Crazy pumping through the speakers and we’d looked at each other with something like recognition and ended up in your saggy bed talking all night, our bodies glistening in the light of a humming street light outside your window, your three-legged rescue cat purring between us, kneading the sweaty sheets – but when I told you about him, your trusting gaze hardened to glass?

Kathryn Silver-Hajo

About Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry appears, or is forthcoming, in Citron Review, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, Ruby Literary, SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, New York Times-Tiny Love Stories, New World Writing, Flash Boulevard, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres, Cleaver Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Learn more at www.kathrynsilverhajo.com and follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KSilverHajo and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo/

Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry appears, or is forthcoming, in Citron Review, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, Ruby Literary, SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, New York Times-Tiny Love Stories, New World Writing, Flash Boulevard, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres, Cleaver Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and others. Learn more at www.kathrynsilverhajo.com and follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KSilverHajo and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo/

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