Forty-Love by Matthew Dube

Brenda liked that her husband Clement felt almost weightless on top of her. She could control him with her pelvis like she was driving her Honda, her progress toward orgasm steady as parking in the garage. A tennis ball hung from the ceiling of the garage on a clothesline, and she knew to stop when the ball rested against the windshield. Sometimes she gave it just the tiniest kiss; others, she knocked against it till it was held suspended for seconds in its arc, its amplitude at maximum bob and then waited, breathless, for it to bounce back against her windshield. Sometimes she barreled into the garage at top speed before jumping on the brakes; at others, she moved so slowly that to an outside observer, Clement perhaps, there was no movement at all. Then, she mashed the button on her controller and the garage door closed behind her.

Matt Dube teaches creative writing and American lit at a small mid-Missouri university and he’s the fiction editor for the online journal H_NGM_N. His shorts have appeared recently in Wederary, Hartskill Review, and Rabbit Catastrophe Review.