Tuesday, February 1, 2011

If I Should Fall In Love

By Randy Lowens

“A thousand times,” she whispered into the darkness of the stubble on his chin.  “A thousand times.”

By conservative estimate, they'd got it on twice a week throughout ten years of marriage.  So the math was easy.  With roughly fifty weeks in a year, that was a hundred couplings per annum.  Over the course of ten years, they'd done it more than a thousand times.

A body would think that sex with the same lover would grow stale over so long a period, that after, say, five hundred instances of intercourse it would become boring.  At least routine.  A body would expect a girl to long for adventure, for some exotic spices added to her fare.  To close her eyes and dwell on ethnic diversity.  To imagine being young and ravaged by a gang of shirtless construction workers.

But no.  Well, yes, she had those fantasies.  But also, each time she had carnal knowledge of her husband, each time they mated like a pair of graceful, frantic deer in rut, when their sleek and sweaty limbs entwined and their hearts thumped like steam engines pounding down some treacherous, gyrating pair of rails, she transcended herself. She left the planet and lay floating, suspended in air, deathless yet not alive, existing in the eternal embrace of winking noon day stars.

They had once fought so often, with such spite and venom, that they sought counseling.  At the close of the session, the pastor warned that no relationship could survive on animal passion alone.  Without a spiritual connection, divorce became an option.  The old preacher had admired her nylon-clad legs that flirted from beneath a plaid skirt as he spoke of God, and she knew he was a fool.

“If I ever get bored, I'll leave you, Baby,” she sighed into the breeze from the box fan resting on the windowsill.  “Or, if I should fall in love, I'll stay and just have an affair.”


Randy Lowens resides in the central Kentucky city of Richmond.  He has been published in A-Minor, Wrong Tree Review, Fried Chicken and Coffee, and elsewhere.

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