Villain
By Ginger Ko

On Saturday mornings your wife jingled with every step as if with spurs powderpuffing dry dirt past a saloon door. With cattle-driver deliberation she would bowleggedly press through each orange cone of streetlamp light beneath my window, and then recede into the day.

After her retreat I would sit in bed and wait for the rise and then the bake, the heat in front of the glass to oscillate. I would hear you stir in the next apartment and drop your heavy shoes on the floor, a long pause before opening the door as you lashed shabby shoestraps with the thinnest of strings. Five steps later you would appear in my entryway looking as you did every time, warped shirt-collar and whiskers in the lap of your pants, sad face pale and long as a moon-sliver. I fancied your expression poetic, but really it was just the cringing eyebrows of a suspendered shopkeep. You would leave my bed in the afternoons to slip on your shoes with laces loose and curlicued.

Years later we walked towards each other on the street. Your wife bore heavily down on your arm with the wet clay face and cubed fists of a prairie woman, and I suppose I was some black-laced hussy wearing fingerless gloves. We shook hands cordially and then broke apart abruptly. I did not look behind me as I walked away wondering who was the good, and who was the bad, your wife certainly being the ugly.

——

Ginger Ko is an occasionally-published writer living in the Midwest. She prides herself on maintaining an elusive presence on the internet.

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