It is late. The sky is meringue. The dress is retro. The hair, which is sometimes highlighted and sometimes shaggy, is without bangs, and there are little pigtails bleached at the tips, wildly jutting out from each ear. She has a crooked nose and a crooked smile and she makes it work. She listens to the Sadies, takes long coffee breaks, and reads George Eliot.

You warily move around each other at the office, almost stalking one another. Or do you? Maybe it’s all in your head.

Still, there are times when she looks right at you, through you, with longing and desire, both humored and intrigued.

Tonight she sits there on the bumper of a van outside some club where a work event has just gone down. Her eyes are half open. Coin slots on the uneven plain of her face. She’s been drinking again.

“Sit down,” she says, patting the spot on the bumper next to her.

“How’s it going?” you say as you take a seat.

“I need to stop,” she says, laying her head on your shoulder.

“Why?” you say, feeling the heat from her cheek burning a hole through your shirtsleeve.

“I have a problem.”

“Do you?”

“My husband says I do.”

“But do you think there’s a problem?”

“Yes, and I need to stop if I want to save the marriage.”

“And do you want to save it?”

“Yes, no, I don’t know,” she says briefly, looking up at you.

Is that an invitation, or is that just defeat? Her head drops to her chest. It looks like defeat.

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Ben Tanzer is the author of the books The New York Stories, Orphans, which won the 24th Annual Midwest Book Award in Fantasy/SciFi/Horror/Paranormal and a Bronze medal in the Science Fiction category at the 2015 IPPY Awards, and Lost in Space, which received an Honorable Mention in the Chicago Writers Association 2014 Book Awards Traditional Non-Fiction category, and now The New York Stories, among others. He has also contributed to Punk Planet, Clamor, and Men’s Health, serves as a Senior Director, Acquisitions for Curbside Splendor, and can be found online at This Blog Will Change Your Life the center of his vast lifestyle empire.

This excerpt is taken from Ben Tanzer’s latest collection Sex and Death.

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