Wilma & Betty: Episode III
Wilma & Betty III: New Year’s Eve
By
Jason Mott
The night was early. The moon was still awakening from the dusk. But, already, all of them—Wilma and Betty and Fred and Barney—were so drunk on Jack Danielstone whiskey that none of them could remember who had suggested “wife swapping.”
The four of them lay sprawled across the new saber-toothed tiger rug that Fred had bought with his Christmas bonus from Mr. Slate a few days earlier.
Wilma and Barney went first. From across the room, Fred and Betty watched.
Even from the depths of her stupor, Wilma could feel a knot of fear in her stomach. It’d been almost a year since a man had touched her. And this man, Barney Rubble, was a notorious lover. The entire neighborhood heard him tearing into Betty with reckless abandon for hour on hour every night. The neighborhood men envied him as much as they hated him. The neighborhood women wanted him as much as they feared being taken by him.
Wilma was no different.
But, when it did finally happen, when she opened herself to him, felt the weight of his stocky frame bearing down on her, felt the warmth of his drunken breath crawling over her breasts, it ended quickly, enjoyably, but quickly. Within moments actually.
From across the room, Betty chewed her lip and made small white boulders with her fists. She ground them into her thighs and a part of her glared at the woman who had drained the strength, the stamina, the rakishness from her husband so quickly; the woman who made her husband coo gently in her ear: “You’re a shard of heaven, you are. A shard of heaven.”
Barney had never spoken to Betty with such tenderness, such soft.
As Barney lay atop Wilma, panting, covered in a thin, glistening layer of sweat, Betty felt envy and jealousy.
She had always known Abel, but now she understood Cain.
When it was Fred and Betty’s turn, Wilma smiled from Barney’s lap. “He’ll never get it up,” she said to Betty, her words slurring as she spoke. “Eleven months now and nothing. The doctor’s making a small fortune in prescriptions that work on everybody but him. Even the ground up tiger cock from China can’t get his engine running. So good luck on rousing that sleeping dog.”
She laughed.
But, much to Wilma’s dismay, Fred had no trouble performing with Betty. The two of them coupled with animalistic ferver: loudly, passionately, with the tenderness and eagerness of wolves. Betty, somehow, coaxed from Fred a desire that Wilma hadn’t seen since they were newlyweds, since their wedding night—the night when she and Fred had broken two bedframes in one weekend at the Rock Vegas Hilton.
That night, right there in front of her, Betty had, for a short time, resurrected the man that Wilma first fell in love with. But, as midnight and the new year claimed the world, with moaning and heavy breaths, that man died beneath Betty’s white thighs and Wilma knew, knew for certain, that she would never be with him again. He was a spirit magicked from love that she, after years of unhappy marriage, had forgotten how to conjure through any arcane or nuptial rites.
When it was all over no one spoke and everyone drank. More and more they drank. They all drank themselves into varying shades of unconsciousness, different degrees of undreaming sleep.
All the while, each and every one of them, they practiced not speaking of the events of that particular New Year’s Eve. Each one, in his or her own heart, secretly agreed that only through amnesia could they greet the dawn and shuffle back quietly into their practiced, well-worn lives.
Outside, dawn breached the sky and sung, drowning out the night.
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