Meaning
by Pernille AEgidius Dake
“You know it meant nothing.” Bert’s eyes narrow.
“With guilt gifts like these—” Samantha jiggles both the brown vinyl case that contains the cubic zirconia tennis bracelet and the cellophane-wrapped Chance perfume. “She must’ve meant something.”
Bert shakes his head low, clearly contrite, needing to erase past cravings, his sleeping with someone named Lizzie, fucking Lizzie, then coming home and lying down and snoring next to Samantha, lying, fucking lying.
“And here I’d thought I had a surprise for you,” she says. “Do you even fish?”
“You know I do.” His lips tighten, same as at restaurants when his tongue will roam for a rogue salmon bone while, in stifled speech and cheeks full, he’ll joke that that isn’t the boner he wants. “It was just a moment of— passion.”
“A crime of passion!”
He inhales, readying yet another round of apologies, of simplifying and chopping his wandering lust into even more negligible details.
Samantha scoffs, “But like you never brought any fish home for dinner, always claimed you set them free, have you let her go?”
“I only used my catch and release-fishing as an excuse for the past year. But not lately.”
“Then, what’s your justification for my gifts?”
“I know you know it meant nothing.”
“Which ‘it’ do you mean? Because—” She reaches behind the couch and pulls out a box of Old Spice aftershave and a new fishing rod. “I’ve no excuse either.”
Pernille AEgidius Dake winter bathes in the Baltic and knits afghans without dropped stitches. Her work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Dime Show Review, Glassworks Magazine, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She can be reached at pernille.dake@vcfa.edu.