Words by Leonora Desar

I’m in bed and then I fall right through the floor. It happens without warning. One minute I’m in bed with my husband, not having sex, and then I’m in bed with the new neighbors. They live downstairs. They always look like they are having sex. Even when they’re not, the sex is in their eyes. I look up at their window, wistfully, at their four-poster bed that’s home to all their sex-making. I say it to my dog, I say do you think they’re having sex. And he says, well what do you think. And now I know. Not only are the neighbors having sex they’re doing the crossword. They’re just that competent. It’s all me and my husband can do to do the sex thing by itself. The crossword would be too much. It would explode our brains. Doing it on Sundays alone is enough. Looking at each other across the table, at all the words we never say.

Leonora Desar’s writing has recently appeared in River Styx, Passages North, Black Warrior Review Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, New Flash Fiction Review, and Quarter After Eight, among others. She won third place in River Styx’s microfiction contest and TSS Publishing’s Flash 400, and was a finalist/runner-up in Quarter After Eight’s Robert J. DeMott Short Prose contest, judged by Stuart Dybek. She lives in Brooklyn and writes a column for New Flash Fiction Review—DEAR LEO.