"Never Salute a Bare Head" by Cate McGowan

Originally published in b(OINK) in February 2017.

The penis arrives in her inbox.

The corporal’s wife gasps as she scrolls through. The grainy photo’s subject is in focus, an erection webbed with veins.

Later, a new flirtation pings its arrival. A staged picture: bespectacled woman straddles a teacher’s desk, short skirt hiked up. Someone’s chalked π on the blackboard: 3.1415926535…

Oh.

A man behind. Mouths agape, a moan. Oh.

She snaps her laptop shut, but the images continue to stream, crawl across her closed eyelids. Even as she bastes the skinless chicken breast every ten minutes, fluffs the minute-rice with a fork only once as explicitly instructed on the package. Dinner’s blanched, boring.

Bedtime and she re-tucks the hospital corners on their king-sized, forgets email. On the other side of their fallow bed, her officer-husband snores, the percale an expanse between them that she won’t cross. She abandons counting sheep, sighs. She’ll never understand mathematics when one plus one never adds up to anything.

She falls asleep with her hand inside the elastic of her best panties.

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Cate McGowan is the author of True Places Never Are (2015), which won the 2014 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for The Lascaux Book Prize. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Norton's Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Phoebe, Shenandoah, Vestal Review, Split Rock Review, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, These Lowly Objects, is forthcoming from Gold Wake Press. A native Georgian and current, reluctant Floridian, McGowan is an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel. 

Cate's website: https://www.catemcgowan.com/Cate's Twitter handle: https://twitter.com/mcgowan_cate