by Adam Lock
For more than twenty years, the only time Loralie had sex was when someone died. Like when Sheila, an old school friend, was hit by a motorbike. She invented the death of a second cousin to test her theory; Arthur consoled her and they made love.
The sex noises from next door begin at ten o’clock. They’re a young couple; he’s a dentist, she’s a teacher. When it’s time, Loralie places her book on the nightstand and turns out the light. She lies on her side, pulls the duvet over her shoulders, closes her eyes, and listens.
Loralie was Death. She killed off a woman she spoke to in the bakery every Friday, her librarian, and a lady who worked the tills at the supermarket in the village. She and Arthur made love several more times, with only one being for a legitimate reason: the death of her brother.
The young woman next door, Grace, has long red hair, pale skin, thin arms. Her sex noises are gentle but assertive, like instructions given to a child.
Loralie doesn’t know the husband’s name. She holds her breath when they reach a steady rhythm. When their noises quicken, increasing in volume, Loralie grips the duvet and pulls it higher.
Arthur’s final breaths were as laboured as those he made in the curve of her neck when on top of her. Not once, even in her breathlessness, did she make sex noises or tell him how much she wanted it.
Above all, Loralie likes the silence next door, afterwards, in which she imagines Grace in his arms, her red hair fanned across his rising and falling chest, their legs entwined, like Romeo and Juliet, soundless and destroyed.
Adam Lock writes in the Midlands, UK. He won the TSS Summer Quarterly Flash Competition 2018 and the STORGY Flash Competition 2018. He was placed third in the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2017, and was shortlisted twice for the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2018. He’s had stories appear in publications such as Lost Balloon, New Flash Fiction Review, Former Cactus, MoonPark Review, Fictive Dream, Spelk, Reflex, Retreat West, Fiction Pool, Ellipsis Zine, Ghost Parachute, and many others. You can find links to his stories on his website: http://www.adamlock.net. He’s also active on Twitter @dazedcharacter.
(And don’t miss Adam’s review of Neil Clark’s Aurora, another trunkated tale. – Elephants Never)