Secret Storm by Sally West

He calls me when he’s fucked up. It can have a cinematic flare, like when he climbed to the top of a hill somewhere out in Arkansas to get phone service, but it’s usually when he’s driving and trying to stay between the ditches. He talks to himself then: I’m so fucked up. I’m so fucked up, and then he pulls into the Circle K to get a six-pack and some cigarettes. How you doin’ tonight? I tried to save his phone messages but they disappeared. There was one – Jesus, it was beautiful.

I sent him a photo of my breast a while back. Okay. Both breasts. But on different occasions. It wasn’t like sending photos to a stranger. He had rubbed himself against them when we were nineteen. It was a new experience for me, and then we got married, so that kind of thing is okay between husband and wife.

I haven’t seen him for almost fifty years, and it’s unlikely that will change. We say we’ll meet for one long weekend “somewhere down the highway”; we declare long lost love, but the closer it gets, the more fucked up he becomes. It doesn’t turn me away even if I think that’s the point. And just when I think he has disappeared for good, he’ll send me a line from a song knowing that I know what comes next.

Sally West is a pseudonym for an essayist and flash fiction writer living on the west coast.

31 May 2024