by MITCHELL KROCKMALNIK GRABOIS

My wife stayed angry about my affair. The space between us in the king bed was like the Midwest, at least Nebraska. Her cold loins supernaturally summoned opportunistic female spirits who had been in transit between the defiled Temple of Jerusalem and the ghettos of Eastern Europe. They found me by the scent of wifely hatred, and of the sourdough starter she had left to spoil on the granite countertop.

Those spirits lowered themselves onto me, took my stiff dick through their portals into desert realms where camels had trampled the tribesmen to death and now called the shots. Carnality had set me a terrible trap, original sin all over again. My mistress wasn’t even anything special.

The concubine spirits took my seed and bore children, who formed their own militia.

Death was like a cloud of nitrous oxide enveloping me. I fell down a deep well, aware of deconstruction in the cave that was my mouth, that homey place where I had chewed egg salad sandwiches, somewhere so far above me.

After I died, my offspring spent their lives in the woods hatching ever more twisted conspiracy theories, and firing assault rifles into the leafy green trees.

My lover was distressed like a foreclosed house. Vandals stole all her copper wire. They kicked holes in her sheet rock. My lover said: Your wife can do me some damage. Meaning: more damage than had already been done to her. Meaning that she had assessed my wife’s physical characteristics and capabilities and had concluded that my wife was bigger and stronger than she was. And angrier.

But my wife had completed her Ph.D and, in the process, had forgotten how to settle conflicts with simple violence.

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MITCHELL KROCKMALNIK GRABOIS has had over a thousand of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, and Queen’s Ferry Press’s Best Small Fictions for work published in 2011 through 2015. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.