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Complicit

Story by Gay Degani (Read author interview) July 26, 2010

art by Gay Degani

The front door slams. Walls shake. A vase of tasseled wheat slides through my hands onto the kitchen floor. Glass shards lie among stalks as late afternoon sun spills gold through gold and I hear his boots in the hall.

A shock of hot wind rattles the screen of the open back door. I glance out. The barn isn’t far, a haven if I would only move. But I don’t. I wait.

He bursts in, shirt flaked with grime, jeans mud-glazed. He stops when he sees me. Between us, a twist of pleasure, eyes locked, breath vanished.

I step toward him in bare feet, feel the bite of glass, reach up to place a hand on his cheek.

“You’re here,” he says.

“Where would I go?”

“I didn’t want you here. Not for this.” He loops me with thick arms, pulls me close, my ear pressed hard against his farmer’s sweat. We stand like vine and tree till he leans down and puts his lips to mine.

When the world comes back, he says, “Where is he?”

If I’d gone to the barn to hide or if I’d left in the wagon as we’d planned, I would not be here to say these words, but I am. “In the field by the creek.”

He sets me on a kitchen stool. “Stay.” At the door he turns back, his mouth grim.

Linoleum, my toe, the rod my feet rest on, smeared with blood. The quiet slap of the screen door. An owl’s hoot from the nearby copse.

I wait in a warm shaft of light, hands in my lap, until I hear a quick loud crack from the north where my husband rides his tractor bare-headed through the wheat.

About the Author

Gay Degani has been nominated here and there for Pushcart consideration, Best Small Fictions, and a few various and sundry honors including the 11th Glass Woman Prize. She is the author of a full-length collection of short stories, Rattle of Want (Pure Slush Press, 2015) and a suspense novel, What Came Before (Truth Serum Press, 2016). Her micro “Abbreviated Glossary” appears in the anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fictionedited by James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro. She occasionally blogs at Words in Placeand is currently working on another novel of suspense.

About the Artist

Gay Degani has been nominated here and there for Pushcart consideration, Best Small Fictions, and a few various and sundry honors including the 11th Glass Woman Prize. She is the author of a full-length collection of short stories, Rattle of Want (Pure Slush Press, 2015) and a suspense novel, What Came Before (Truth Serum Press, 2016). Her micro “Abbreviated Glossary” appears in the anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fictionedited by James Thomas and Robert Scotellaro. She occasionally blogs at Words in Placeand is currently working on another novel of suspense.

This story appeared in Issue Twenty-Eight of SmokeLong Quarterly.
SmokeLong Quarterly Issue Twenty-Eight
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