(Image provided by Christopher Ananias)

(Editor’s note: Today and tomorrow and Wednesday we welcome Christopher Ananias, who is a first rate writer and photographer. Christopher takes a good look at the world and returns with honest first rate prose. His biography appears at the bottom of this post.–LA)

And the words, like a kind of conjuring, brought the ladies from the sheets of rain. Like they all rode together in the same car or dark cloud. One held the door for the other three, as they hurried inside, fine heels clacking, and the door shut. Their perfume and rain drops mingled together, and it was strong and pleasant, but it made Vanda dizzy, thinking of death. A death lay before her.

Vanda stood over Randall and the other three young women gave her a moment. She wore the dark shawl of a mourner. Her companions watched and observed the silent ritual, then they chatted. The conversation became louder, and for a raucous moment, it seemed they had forgotten the solemn rules.

Vanda imagined wearing a black veil. A veil that is reserved for widows, and not young ladies who fall into traps with older married men. She touched the glossy black casket. Her long white fingers looked starkly bright in contrast. The casket felt as though it had sat in a cold basement, instead of a carpeted funeral home with a furnace huffing in its bowels.

She looked at Randall. He looked very attractive to her, and the urge came on strong, and she wanted to climb on top of him. Make necrophiliac love. A moan slipped from her. Did her shopping companions, and confidants, who even accompanied her to the funeral of her adulterous lover, hear that lustful moan? I’m way out of line, thought Vanda. What right do I have to be here? And to think these sick thoughts!

What shoes did he wear? Were they his slick brown office shoes, doubling for—forever shoes? Her fingers pulled at the lower lid and it creaked. She glimpsed his bare white toes and dropped it with a thump! The jarring acrid taste of fear turned in her stomach. What am I doing?

Vanda looked over at the window and the water streamed down in cold beads. She could see the drab cars on the street. They were in a certain order, except for one. Her flashy red sports car, which they crowded into. It looked impossibly bright, and beautiful, somewhat like her own flashing beguiles of full lips, white teeth, and shapely aerodynamic curves. And wrong. It looked too fast, drop your pants without underwear fast, too ritzy, among the subdued and stoic Nissans and Toyota Camrys.

She could feel the fear of being outed, out of decency, out of my mind, you’re out-of-order, Miss! She watched the rain bead down the window, and in the gray light, her body became as still as the corpse in the casket. Who died, in a sudden cardiac arrest, riding a stationary bicycle with a blown heart to eternity. She thought again, what am I doing here?

Vanda had lived for two years in the shallow grave of discovery. Randall claimed his wife went on sniff and fluid patrols and dug through his clothes, and scanned his phone looking for traces of the other woman. Her.

Randall, the handsome sandy-haired accountant with designer glasses had the exact answers to the balance sheet of adultery. He would stand in his underwear, his flat 41-year-old workout stomach with a hint of a six-pack on view. Vanda watched his rituals still nude from her fluffy and deeply comfortable bed. He rolled the lint remover over his office clothes. “Look Vanda, that’s a long one.” He showed her the roller. A long blond hair, matted against the sticky surface, doing two laps. “Penny would go apeshit if she found that one! She’s got her Dad’s old Walther Pistol too…”

Sometimes as they lay in the afternoon sun. His phone would chime, sending ice sickles up Vanda’s spine. WIFEY lit up in red letters on the large iPhone screen. It was an invasion of her inner sanctum. Her sanctum of them. She watched his cool fingers typing with the energy of a man that has his cake and has just got done with it too, and might have another piece.

Randall had a second phone for their relationship. A cheap burner like he was a drug dealer clocking out by the concrete blocks on South Street. The relationship revolved solely around his time schedule. Vanda knew her friends thought she was a fool, as she dialed each one after some broken plan.

The Colts game became one that got seared into her primal cortex. Vanda saw Randall and his family on TV in the stands! Randall’s arm is around his dark-shiny-haired wife, wearing a blue Colts jersey on her buxom chest. She looked strong and beautiful and Vanda was afraid of her. Afraid of her righteousness, and that gun. Randy Jr. sat basking in the light of his loving parents that was as real as her own misery. She got all of this from one little eye-popping pan of the TV camera that landed on Randall.

Randall’s little boy whom she heard about a million times, added a dark layer of guilt to this adulterous cake. Vanda felt like she was committing attempted murder against the fable of his happy family.

She looked out the window again in the foggy gloom ever so fitting for a funeral. The widow and little Randy Jr. came up the sidewalk, and Vanda slipped out a side door, where several shiny caskets waited on biers like boats for the river Styx. Her three friends got a group text. “Meet me outside.”

And the words conjured them into a downpour and into the red sports car with a cat emblem on the hood. Packed to the ceiling, with four beautiful babes, cascades of shiny wet hair, sleek young arms dripping on the door panels, and shiny shaved legs in skirts cocked up into the dash and bald knees pushed into the back of the seats. Their voices were full of exclamations and laughter like they came from the sunshine of good times instead of a rainy funeral parlor.

#

Later that evening Vanda laid on her sumptuous bed in her Randall-less boudoir, and dialed Randall’s widow, WIFEY. Unbeknownst to each other they were at that very moment each, smelling one of Randall’s dress shirts. The phone rang three times. Vanda thought, What am I doing? I don’t have any right to call her. I’m way out of line. Something rekindled inside her like the excitement of the affair.

“Hello,” WIFEY sounded perfect to Vanda. Like a strong, complete woman.

Vanda raised up, dropping the shirt on her naked waist, covered in Randall’s scent, and said, “I-I.”

“Who is this?”

“I found your dog, the uh, black Yorkie.” Vanda felt like she was reading a line from a terrible play, which she mostly forgot.

“We don’t have a dog.”

“I found little Randall’s dog. The black Yorkie. His name is…uh,” Vanda glanced around the room landing on the blank TV screen. “His name is Sanyo.”

“I told you we don’t have a dog.” Then the phone went silent. “Did you say my son’s name?”

“He’s a good little dog, Randall Junior will miss him.”

“It’s you isn’t it? The whore.”

“Sanyo wants to come home. Please let me bring him to you and Randall Junior.”

“I saw your little red sports car outside the funeral home.” Her voice rose. “How dare you? You have no boundaries. You filthy whore!”

“Sanyo loves little Randall, very-very much. Please.”

“Look I’m going to say this so you can understand. If you come near my house or Randall Junior. I will blow your fucking head off. I might anyway.” WIFEY dropped the phone and jammed Randall’s shirt into a trash sack lumped with his other clothes.

“But what about the reward?” said Vanda into the dead air. Then she masturbated.

THE END

Christopher J. Ananias enjoys wildlife photography. He likes to walk along the railroad tracks, dodging the trains. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grim and Gilded, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Literally Stories UK and others.