Anatomy of a Fling
Even the Christians were getting all kinds of action.
Lilia watched them while she waited for Sofia, feeling a hole open up inside her.
Theodore always said that people only fucked in movies. “It’s not really like that,” he would scoff whenever a sex scene came on. “Not in real life. Nobody does that.”
Lilia wasn’t sure when this notion had become one of her core assumptions about life, but now, on Easter Sunday, in the church parking lot, she watched it dissolve in a storm of petals.
As soon as Lilia got home, she went straight up to the attic and looked in the mirror.
She was 37, and she had become more beautiful than ever in the last year. Everyone said so.
And yet she had only cheated on Theodore twice since he stopped touching her.
And how long ago was that? 7 years.
7 years of masturbating on the attic floor and climaxing in tears because she couldn’t remember what the scratching of a man’s beard felt like.
7 years and a million dollars in Saint Points for every time someone pointed to Theodore and remarked, “You’re a lucky woman, i wish my husband had that sense of style.”
But the life of a martyr didn’t suit her anymore.
Fuck it. It was time to summon the snake.
Rage
Cuss out your husband for never fucking you.
Cuss out your ex-best friend for betraying you.
Think of the most awful, villainous things you could do for revenge and scream-cry into a pillow while you picture yourself doing them.
Unless you can get utterly enraged, the snake won’t come.
2. Pleasure
Pleasure is the pilot light that ignites the spell.
Dial it up now.
3. Incantations
Say [redacted] three times.
But once is usually enough.
Or don’t say anything at all.
Simply open yourself when you hear it hissing from the other side of the mirror.
The snake is your new best friend.
Now all you have to do is let entwine you.
*Remember — rage, THEN pleasure. Not the other way around.
You can spend your whole life wanting, grinding, searching for something, and then not be able to receive it when it finally comes.
A wise woman had told Lilia that.
Not now. This time, she would expand from the heavens to the deepest pits of the underworld to receive what she wanted.
“It looks like your drink is empty,” he said. “Mine too.”
i am the source of all creation, i hold the entire universe inside me —
Lilia suddenly realized she had forgotten to take her magnesium supplement that day.
In a split second, the lack of magnesium undid all the hard work of the positive affirmations she had been repeating to keep her nerves at bay.
Now her muscles would be stiff and the whole experience, long-awaited for seven years, would be ruined, and this man would hate her, and she would die celibate.
A more reasonable thought popped up: what if yesterday’s magnesium was still in her bloodstream? If only there was a way of knowing.
If only there was a way to be certain that this whole night wouldn’t end in disaster.
When they got out of the elevator, he couldn’t find his keys. Disaster indeed. But he reached up and ran his hand along the doorframe, saying nonchalantly, “I always keep a spare. Aha.” His common sense and reliability let Lilia relax a little, which she hoped would trigger an increase in bloodflow.
The lock clicking open was a small explosion.
As Lilia stepped over the threshold, she got a vision of a woman dressed in lavish furs, with a crown of roses on her head. An ancestor, maybe. The woman smirked, as if to remind her that human beings had been engaging in sexual relations for hundreds of thousands of years without the help of magnesium.
Lilia laughed to herself and took off her own fake fur coat. In the mirror, the pearls around her neck glistened. It didn’t matter that they were plastic — royalty is a state of mind.
This was how it was supposed to be.
Not struggling in a barren desert, sucking the marrow out of the only cactus in sight —-
Fecund, warm, wet.
This wasn’t trivial at all, it was eternal.
This must be what love felt like when it didn’t hurt.
The snake’s work was done and now it was sleeping in the fresh sunlight.
Lilia had to be home before the girls woke up. While she gathered her things, she wondered how this would work.
She imagined a future where this new man moved into her house, Theodore moved up to the attic, and they all lived in domestic harmony.
Medieval peasants used to share one oversized bed and not know whose children were whose. Maybe humans had evolved to live that way, and the addition of Lilia’s new lover would be a return to nature.
She glanced back towards the bedroom. Whatever happened, nothing would be the same.
The snake stayed behind in the kitchen.
For a few glorious moments on the drive home, Lilia was in a void.
No jam stains to scrub out of the tablecloth, no spreadsheets waiting for her.
Just the sun rising above the ruins of her old life.
Lilia came home as if expecting to find the temple of home and family in ruins, and instead found it intact.
Living the double life, when you can only be your true self in the shadows, means constantly going past the point of no return and then returning anyway.
