I couldn’t resist Willard Dixon’s pale pink house. I think it was the colors, the colors and the shadows. Quite calming, but delicately sexual, too. I thought being in that painting might assuage the jitteriness I’d been suffering in my pregnant state. When I got close to the wall my shadow surprised me. I didn’t know what to make of it. That can’t be me, I thought. But it was, in its way—I’m such a blob. No girlish grace. About to leave, I heard sounds coming from inside. Almost breathless. Not enough to flutter the labia-colored curtains. Words of sex. “Deeper. Harder. Fuck me. Fuck me harder now. Make me come. Oh, God, you’re gonna make me...” Then the back of the throat gasp, the warbled ah of orgasm. Then quiet but for the faint, creaking song of bedsprings. I waited for his groan. It was important for me to hear him climax, to know that he was shooting his stuff deep into her welcoming cunt.

Waiting, I sit against the sun-warmed wall. “Yes now, come in me, come honey, come, come, come.” With the quiet after, my mind eases five or six years into the future, curly-headed moppets playing in the yard, and then the parents calling them inside for supper. And in they run, with the black and white spotted dog from my first-grade reader bounding after them. When I get home I’m going to ask Nils if we can get a dog.