Pink coat

(It's been far too long since I've exercised my scratch fiction muscles.)

Her face was delicate; small nose, fine lines around her eyes. Filigree earrings dropped from dainty earlobes, a tiny pearl suspended, quivering. Her body seemed to belong to someone else, grossly overweight beneath her petal-pink coat, tiny feet planted wide to balance all those pounds tossed back and forth with the lurching of the bus.

Rom couldn't look away. There was something morbidly fascinating about her, as though her body had swelled suddenly, while she was looking the other way; her face, lips pink and soft, was plainly used to admiration.

When she moved toward the door at her stop, Rom felt himself pulled after. If someone had asked him why, he wouldn't have been able to say. It was dinnertime, he should be on his way home, just three more stops on this line, but even as he thought it, following this woman around the corner, her weight shifting ponderously from foot to foot in the cow-like shuffle of the obese, even as he thought of his wife glancing at the clock while she dialled their favorite Chinese takeout, he knew it was too late. He wouldn't be home in time for dinner.

The woman turned her head, her strawberry blond hair swept gracefully back, and tossed him a flirtatious glance before disappearing behind a new townhouse, into an empty lot.

Rom followed, the clash of traffic in the street behind dipping into silence, he could still make out the glimmer of pink in the dark ahead, this lot larger than it seemed from the street, stretching deep between blind, windowless buildings on either side, the sky boxed in as they seemed to grow taller, Rom stumbling now on gravel, the ground cold, even through the soles of his Timberlands.

A voice whispered, almost inaudible, pushing out from the dark at his shoulder, "What is it you want?"

Her voice as meltingly sweet as her face.

"Do you know?" she asked, Rom turning now to face her.

"Is it this?" she asked, unbuttoning her pink coat, Rom feeling a sudden shame, a sickness at the thought of her body, while, like a separate being, his cock stirred.

Rom stood, dumbly, his hands at his sides, while she pulled open her coat, light pouring out from inside, blinding him, the last thing he remembered the distant sound of ocean waves, the call of seagulls.