Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

“You are going to sleep with me”, said my wife as she stepped out of the future and spoke to a man who wasn’t me.

“You’re so strange”, smiles the man as he touches her fingers and pushes the hair from her eyes.

“First you will cup my breast and pin me against the wall in the bathroom of the hospital in which your mother lays dying. You will tongue my lips and I’ll contract the pathogen black rot of your lies. And I will carry their stain and I will pass it on down to my children.”

“That’s rather dramatic. I think I told you she was sick, but how did you know she’s dying? Doesn’t matter, Look, I’ve only known you a few months but I can see you’re sad. I’ve seen you with him. Your boyfriend. I see you walking together and it’s as if you’re strangers. You deserve better.”

“I forgot about my husband and my children, I forgot as I lay down with you. I escaped with you, though you took me nowhere and together we lied to them all.”

“Married? You’re not married, are you? And if you have children then you’ve kept them very quite. Do you have them locked up in a box?”, smiles the man who isn’t me.

“My children are my life”

“If this is the future you see for us, then, I have to say I would never lie to you. You are so full of potential. Maybe, you need someone who really cares to tell you sometimes, is all.”

“The day I told him about us was the day I tore him in two. But he stayed with me. For years and years and years, he stayed. He loved me best he could but the drip, drip, drip sticky filth of what we did just never stopped”

“There’s no need for this. All I want is to have a little fun. You’re over-thinking.”

“Will you smile at your wife tonight when you still have the stink of my sweat on your skin? Will you feel shame as tomorrow you sit at your table with your son and you look over his shoulder at the couch where you pushed me down and pulled at my hair?”, said my wife as she remembered the last moments of my life. When I looked at her and she knew that old age had robbed me of every thought but that still I saw just what she’d done.

“I love my wife. But I love you, too”

“You won’t and you don’t have to believe me, but I came back. I lived a long life with this chaos we wrought. And you, well, you went on with your wife and your children and you lied for yourself the most splendid of lives.”

“You’re fucking sick”

“When he died I broke and I fell and when I got up I was young again and back here at this fork in the road. I thought it was a chance to repair what I did but it isn’t. Things are not as they were. I am not married and my children they do not yet exist. It is you with the family now.”

I walk up to my wife, my girlfriend, as she sits in the Cafè with a man who isn’t me. I smile and I shake his hand firmly and I hope that he smells the cooling beads of his wife’s sweet sweat as it drifts to him down from my skin.