Romance by Rachel Nagelberg

The play was okay, but they got drunk, which made it better. Going to the theatre was just a game of delaying anyway, she thought a postponement of the inevitable. They slugged two plastic Dixie cups of wine at the ten minute intermission and walked goofily back to their seats, trying to appear prim and proper. She wore an ironed pale yellow dress and he a buttoned down blue and green striped shirt. They sat there stiff with nerves, their eager bodies buzzing. At one point she whispered in his ear a sarcastic comment about the older couple sitting in front of them, and he threw his head back and laughed. After the curtain fell, he drove them to a dark restaurant, where they nibbled on large portions and talked about their childhoods, finishing off a bottle and a half. He handed his leftovers to a bum who prodded them on the street on the way back to the car, and she silently thought him weak-spirited. At her door, they stood for a moment in silence before she thought to invite him in. In her kitchen, where she began fussing around for her kettle, her misplaced tins of tea, she felt the coldness coming in, slithering like silk around her bones, forming icy knots around her organs. She tried desperately to shove it aside. She knew that the tea was unnecessary, that the movement she felt from behind her was his body slowly moving in. In her bed, as he fucked her from on top, she watched his grey face pucker, observed his frenzied breaths. His grunting. His sighing. It was as if she existed in a whole other place altogether, a different space and time that he was inside the moment and she was forever outside, looking in. She pressed harder with her hips, feigning a heightened energy, and quickly his movements became rapid and terse, his back tense beneath her palms. "I'm gonna come!" he screamed in crescendo, and she tilted her gaze to the side. Later, she would fantasize about touching him in the theatre slowly and gently moving her hand across the seat divider and brushing the backs of her fingers along the front of his jeans. She would become very anxious and hot, wondering why she couldn't have just done this then, why her body froze and always freezes precisely at these times. All of her fantasies, she would realize, after she'd masturbated on her sofa, her dress hiked up around her waist, were just reenactments of the past scenarios in which she acted boldly in scene, achieving some embedded desire that for her only seemed to exist before and after, in absence.


Rachel Nagelberg currently lives in San Francisco where she is working on her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of San Francisco.