The Affair

My father, a recent retiree, decided to have an affair with the broom. My mother never suspected a thing. She only wondered once, and only for a split second, if her husband was perhaps spending too much of his free time doing housework.

A few months into the affair, the broom asked him to marry her.

“I can’t. I already have a wife,” he replied. “But we can always have an affair.”

And they did. As my mother continued to work in the day, he would pull out the broom from the closet by her waist and dance her down the corridors of the house, her bristly dress sweeping erotically across the dusty marble.

He even told the broom how deeply he loved her. She would look at him for a long time after that and answer that she would never let him go.

One night, when my mother kissed him on his cheek, which she did every night before she slept, he realised that he had begun to miss her.

The following morning, he opened the door to the closet and said to the broom, knowing she never slept, “I must leave you. I must try to save my marriage.”

But the broom smiled at him with pity. “Too late for that, my dear,” she replied. “I am all you know now.”

She was right. My mother had become a total stranger to him, her eyes like the start of long corridors he could no longer see the other end of, while his heart turned into a closet which the broom moved into like her second home.

In the years to follow, the affair went on and he was able to conceal his guilt and his remorse. And my mother never suspected a thing.


(Published in Vox)