Legitimate Secrets

This week Pegman took us to Goizueta, Navarre in Spain. Thanks, Karen. Now I want to visit this gorgeous country.

A delicate balance, our relationship. You down beside the road, me up on the hill. My husband leaves. Your wife returns. My husband returns. Your wife goes into town.
A mere half-hour passes in between. When no one watches we exchange winks and nods. Touch hands in our kitchen or your hallway.
Our children play together. Sadly we use their playtime to exchange notes; tuck papers inside their tiny socks. It’s not our fault. We do what we can.
I don’t believe either of us remembers how this started. Church? The market? Whispers in the alley?
But we must keep up our relationship. We must, for if we don’t, one or all of us will surely die. Times have come to that.
We no longer know which side we’re on, but we do know our secret exchanges will keep our families from dying in our country’s ugly war.

 

 

Detective’s Notes

This 150 word piece is for What Pegman Saw – in Dubrovnik.

Let’s say Tanya and Stewart had an affair.
Met at the bottom of the stairs
to grope one another in the dark.
Her whispering, “But my husband!” like a mantra
even as her clothes dropped on the cobblestones.

Scratch that. Stewart was a painter, Tanya his student.
They despised one another.
Still, they shared ideas about color and texture and the effects of wine.
And, after too much wine, they…?
You decide.

Or perhaps they were siblings –
they certainly looked alike –
with a deliriously dark secret
about what their father did at night.
Tanya’s room? Stewart’s? Both?
And that twisted them until they had no one but each other?
Alas, there are no definite answers to these questions, either.

What do we know?
At 5 a.m. both were found dead beneath the paintings.
Clothes flung across the cobblestones –
wine sloshed between them –
holding hands and smiling.
No signs of a struggle.