Two Stories by Meg Pokrass

Otter

 They first met at the beach coffee shop. After quick hellos, he rubbed his hands together, then put them around his neck. “I can’t ever ever get them warm.” He had a two-year-old dog, limping on a leash at his feet.

 "Cold hands are curable,” she said.

 "Oh?" A passing lane of wrinkles divide his brow. She dog-paddles near, hoping to watch him surf.

 ***

She sleeps at his apartment once a month, warms his hands between her thighs. Her open, shell-shaped mouth kisses his closed lips, her tongue, once, trying to pry them open.

 "Otter," he calls her, knotting her hair with his knuckles.

 He howled for months after Star drowned. Then he began rescuing incurable, difficult dogs. The neighbors were embarrassed: the limping dogs, the howling.

 When she's not with him, she knows what he does. He sits in the living room watching private, silent movies of starfish, tentacles opening and closing inside and underneath. He and those dogs.

***

 She calls him sometimes to make sure he has not joined her yet.

 Before Christmas, windows are knocked out and four of the dogs sit outside like failed bodyguards. Neighbors all over the house, like mussels attaching to the evidence. She drives to the ocean to see the pink foam.

Beard

A flood of pain, two codeine, her forehead twitching from the explosive party up the street—drunk, happy couples hip-bumping on their way home. She kisses the dog's glossy ears. Imagines the street opening, a man gazing into her window, stroking his beard, holding a red cigarette.

Her husband’s up on the roof now, clean-shaven, trying to patch things with crazy glue. He reads up there, at night with a flashlight. “It’s quite safe!”

The kid’s off at college, and she's still in her bathrobe and slippers, letting the dog out to pee, making quiet noises to soothe him, or to soothe herself.

She pulls at her hair, thin as thread, wants to tell her doctor about the grass she can't walk on anymore because it’s uneven, the embarrassment she feels about that. She imagines herself in a movie in which an invisible woman betrays her husband by stroking an old photograph of his bearded face.

Meg Pokrass is the author of eight collections of flash fiction. She is the Founding Editor and Series Co- Editor of Best Microfiction. Currently, Meg lives in Inverness, Scotland.