Song and Dance

The soulful licks of the electric guitar’s howl peeled layer after layer from him with each sonorous spank. The refrain had become cliché rhetoric—If lovin’ you is wrong, I don’t wanna be right—but tonight it had been rewritten and plucked from the airwaves by the hand of the Divine.

His insides sizzled as he poured whiskey over the coals of guilt that had grilled hand-squoze patties of self-loath into scorched stones even the dog would turn away.

He rolled down the driver-side window and the slope of angry rain avalanched into his face. The window to her bedroom was the only one with even a whisper of light sneaking around in the great big house. He chanted in his head that her husband would be on another trip in a few days and it would be his own shadow brushing across the curtains, and that was enough; he didn’t
want to be right.