SUGGESTIBLE

Returning home from the bar, she noticed that the man who had been behind her in line that morning at the convenience store (she had paid special notice to his haircut, buzzed short and blonde but with a conspicuous forelock, as if he was a soldier from a futuristic army) and who she had noticed again in the parking lot of the day-care center (he was sitting in his car, talking on his telephone, and she had wondered if he was a single dad to one of  the other kids, speculation that quickly led to the fantasy that they would meet, feel an instant attraction, and fall in love), was now driving behind her, and that’s when it came to her that the man was neither a futuristic soldier nor a single dad but rather a detective, and that he had been hired by her estranged husband to track her movements and build a case against her, and she tried to track her own movements, but for the moment could only go back as far as the bar, and she didn’t recall seeing the detective there but there had been another man, an older man, who she had flirted with, let him buy her drinks, done a line with him in the bathroom, made out with him a bit in the dark seam neglected by the streetlights in the parking lot, so if the detective had been there, he could have seen some or all of it, and if he had seen some or all of it, Brian would get the photos, the audio, the video, and she would get a call from her lawyer, Ken, that she had messed up again, and Ken's voice would be rising with anger not only because he wanted her to win custody but because the two of them had slid from a purely professional relationship into “something more hybrid,” as he liked to say, and he had been spending Wednesday and Fridays over at her place, an arrangement that she knew made him happy, she could hear him singing in the shower, she could see the way he had suddenly started to share his most closely held ideas (he believed that dreams were a portal to either heaven or hell, that the spirit was briefly taken one way or the other during sleep), but what would he make of the bar, or the coke, or the older guy in the parking lot, and what could she do to make sure he never made anything of it, and that was when she remembered a scene from a movie where a car had managed to speed up and slow down in such a way that it ran the car behind it right off the road, after which there was an explosion down in the canyon and a fireball that spun in the air, and she feathered the gas pedal, trying to remember exactly what had happened in the movie. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas