For the sake of twenty

For the sake of twenty
By Rino Palmani

The electrical lit up the bedroom like there were a dozen cameras
flashing outside the window.

"You were good," she said to him.
"So were you," he said.
You kiss one woman, you've kissed them all, he thought. You touch one
woman, you've touched them all, so what the hell I am doing here?

"You know about Carmen, yet you still slept with me."
"I did it because I wanted it."She was looking up at him, the tips of
her breasts like rubber bullets pressed against his chest.
"Don't you feel guilty about this?" He slid his hand to the slick,
moist place between her legs.
"Ummm?Not really, you're the one with the strings attached, not me. And
I can't do your thinking for you."

He closed his eyes, thought about his wife in another country. How they
came from their hometown to the capital with a suitcase and a few
canned goods. How her breasts had gotten bigger and darker after
bearing their first daughter. Carmen is a good woman, he thought. Shit,
I used to be a good man too. But being in another country working a
shit job in a factory, sure does take a lot out of a man. Makes a man
start seeing things in grey.

When he met Renata, he found her voice to be a turn-off. It sounded
like a kettle dragged across a rough asphalt road. But hell, she had a
fairly tight body and he loved the way her skin was tight on her
forehead the first time he kissed her in a park underneath Kangaroo
Point Cliffs and how she would take him in her mouth and swallow his
semen.

And so he slid further into the grey area.
No rules.
No sense of justice.
Just a sense of seeing things in grey and a numbness in the chest when
he remembered his wife. Which did not happen often.

Fuck, he thought. Sometimes being a good man just isn't good enough
anymore. Like following the rules had gotten me somewhere. Every one in
this town seems to be screwing someone else's husband or someone else's
wife and no one has been struck dead by an unearthly hand, so why
bother being virtuous.h

"You know what I want to do?" he said.
"What?"
"This." He pinned her arms to the bed and entered her.

And the electrical storm lit up the sky like a thousand cameras and
lightning struck some monarch trees and the flames grew more than
twenty metres high and ember showers started more fires and more than
five hundred houses were burned and there were more than fourteen
hundred deaths.

Abraham said, " Now that I have been so bold as to speak to my Lord,
what if only twenty can be found?" He said, "For the sake of twenty I
will not destroy the place."

-Genesis 18: 31