The Sow’s Sweet Curse

The convention hall smells of candle wax and burnt sage, and your husband's laugh is still echoing through the crowd from his place at the podium— that particular laugh he saves for strangers he has decided are beneath him. The laugh his supporters love. The woman he mocked has gone pale, ashamed of her own body, and her wife has come to her side. She does not shout. She only looks at Cassius, the golden haired viper who will likely be president someday, a long moment, and then at you, standing one step behind him as always, protected, loved, and says something low in a language you don't know. She blows a kiss, and you feel it land somewhere deep inside you.

'Not him,' the witch says, in plain words now, for the whole convention center to hear. 'Him I can't reach. But he touches you every day, wife, doesn't he? So we'll let his hands do the teaching.' She turns and walks away, and her wife takes her arm, and the crowd parts for them like water.

Cassius takes a moment, then laughs. “Like I said, we all know their type are a bunch of crazies.” The crowd eats it up, and you try not to dread what does not exist.

That night Cassius kisses your lips as soon as the car doors close — ordinary, absent, the way he has a thousand times — and something under your skin shifts. You feel it settle, heavy and patient, like a stone rolling into place at the bottom of a river. In the side mirror's reflection your nose looks, for just a moment, broader than it was. And far across town, you would swear you can feel someone watching, waiting to see what kind of man he turns out to be — and what kind of creature you turn out to be instead.