I Am the Lion Now

Margaret took a bath. The tub, like all tubs in apartments worth living in, was grimy. She had scrubbed it many times, but the porcelain remained gray and streaked with rust around the drain. She didn’t mind. She also kissed dogs on the mouth, didn’t wash her fruit. Let the squeamish suffer their fear, let them live without really living. Margaret was safe in her risk taking.

In the kitchen, Toby baked a cake, his second: the first one had burned. Margaret had assumed he’d forgotten to turn on the timer, but this was deliberate. He’d wanted to have sex, more than he wanted to eat cake, and he knew that if the timer went off in the middle, they would stop to handle it. They were married, and passion was not greater than cake.