Your father’s wife. Three words and Nora couldn’t push enough air out of her lungs to speak. Everything rolled over her in slow motion. She gasped and stumbled, like she had missed a step on an invisible stairwell. Thick tongues slid over yellowed teeth. Eyes matted with liner and mascara blinked and watered as they stared out vacantly at her. She felt streaks of hot and cold panic roll around inside of her.

My father’s current wife?

Of thirty-five years?

Her stomach threatened to spill the ham sandwich she’d chosen for lunch. Her hands shook with impossible tremors. My mother was a mistress? Didn’t you have to be sexy and mysterious to be a mistress? Did mistresses bake pies? These panic attacks had gotten worse in the past year. She could feel them coming but was powerless to stop the crippling panic from washing over her. They were all looking. So many eyes.

He never belonged to us.

Her father, already a hazy, distant man, was coloring himself even farther out of the picture like a finger smudge on a poor charcoal rendering. He’d been obscure, mercurial, chronically late, and impossibly charming. He winked after telling a bawdy joke and never made it to a single sporting event she was in. Her father, on top of being all of those things, wasn’t even her own.

The constriction of Nora’s throat intensified. Maybe she would suffocate to death right here at her sexy mistress mother’s feet.

“Nora! Have some water. Have a seat. Nora!” She heard their distant alarm, but couldn’t reach out to them. She just stood there, compulsively swallowing and sweating through her lovely yellow dress.

Oh, she forgot one. Another reason not to make a sex tape with your college boyfriend:

1. You’ll develop an inconvenient panic disorder that makes even the smallest tasks seem impossible.

Thank goodness she’d cultivated a calm and predictable life, minimizing ridiculous surprises . . .

Just then, Mrs. Dash slapped the table commanding the attention of everyone in the room. “Honey, if you need smelling salts after that bit of old news you’ll need a stretcher by the end of this meeting.”

About the Author

Author photo by Frank W Images

By day, Nikki Payne is a curious tech anthropologist who asks the right questions to deliver better digital services. By night, she dreams of ways to subvert canon literature. She’s a member of Smut U, a premium feminist writing collective, and is a cat lady with no cats.

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