Liar by Ryan Ritchie

The sun had set an hour prior, and the motion detector Michael was supposed to fix two weeks ago still didn’t work. After nearly tripping over the wooden step on their porch, Jenna spent a minute unsuccessfully matching key to lock before her husband rose from the couch, where he was watching The Sopranos, to let her in.

“You realize you’ve been trying to put a key into a screen door?” he asked.

Jenna shook her floppy blonde hair up and down.

“Are you high?” Michael continued, his V-shaped brown eyebrows hinting at disgust and disappointment. Jenna might have been high—she was, in fact, thanks to the crew sharing a joint after quitting time—but not so high that she could forget how her fun boyfriend had morphed into a square husband.

“I thought we agreed you weren’t gonna do that shit after the pregnancy,” Michael said as the couple entered the living room, the one with the Oakland Raiders poster above the television that Jenna agreed to hang two years earlier, when she was too stoned to tell Michael that twenty-seven-year-old men shouldn’t have NFL paraphernalia in the house.

Jenna walked to the bedroom—Michael following, the baby asleep in the corner crib—and removed her smock, the white one with the green streaks down the left leg, the one that reminded her she wanted to paint portraits, not walls.

“It’s been six months,” Michael said. “You promised me, Jenna.” 

Jenna rolled the smock and tossed it into the hamper, the one with the overflow from Michael’s failure to do a single goddamn thing this Saturday as Jenna sweated off last night’s Special C from El Burrito Junior in the only building in downtown Lomita without air conditioning.

“I lied.”

Ryan Ritchie is a 42-year-old writer from Lomita, CA. His work has been published in Rolling Stone, Vice, Los Angeles Times, and more. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

18 February 2022