Night in Pink Satin, by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Cover of Being Legendary at Royal Ontario Museum: Confronting Colonialism, Rethinking History by Kent Monkman (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2022). Cover features the artwork, I Come From pâkwan kîsik, the Hole in the Sky,” by Kent Monkman (Canada) 2022.

Night In Pink Satin 
 
The evening was awash in sweet, sneak-up-on-you Cosmos, of bodies colliding and sliding near and around each other. Eduardo emerged with all these sensations in his bleary half-awake brain. He was sure of one thing. He’d arrived at Randy’s party fully dressed, a golden cucumber dangling from one ear, hair in a flirty ponytail and lips pomegranate juicy red. Truth be told, though, he was still nursing a bit of heartbreak and he’d only agreed to go because dear ravishing Randy promised it would cure what ailed him.
 
But he can’t remember how the high heels got on his feet, how his fitted, pinstriped Gucci suit was replaced with sumptuous silken streamers, how his lipstick had smeared deliciously onto his neck and muscled chest. He tried to hold onto the hints of maraschino and cotton candy tantalizing his tongue, of images and sensations that had begun to fade and gray as he entered the conscious world and the sun intruded through the gap in his blackout shades. 
 
But still… There was the sense of a wolf with a man’s body or a man in a wolf suit licking his thighs, his chest, chewing delicately here and there as he struggled to remain passive, covering his arousal with a gorgeous peach satin number, pretending to focus on the buoyant clouds that floated him near the hole in the aurora borealis sky salted with stars and peppered with tiny, naughty love creatures. And Randy. Floating by in zebra stripes and feathers as Eduardo tried to grip his hand that kept slipping like those streamers sliding off slick skin.
 
And those commanding, terrible winged beasts with beaks of amber and taut, roseate buttocks flying around with—was it ill intent or erotic promise? He sensed them lobbing rainbows across the sky like the offerings of some prismatic deity, but also tossing a scalding sun—a persimmon beachball—whose heat would burn your delicate skin if it orbited too close.
 
Eduardo patted the far side of the bed half expecting his hand to land on Randy’s thigh or chest, but found only crumpled sheets. Had he even been here? Eduardo hugged his plump pillow close, trying to hold on to last night’s sweet, strange, bawdy pleasures in the darkened solitude of his loft apartment for as long as he could.

Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Kathryn Silver-Hajo is a 2023 Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing nominee whose flash fiction, CNF, and poetry has been published in many lovely journals and included in a number of anthologies. Her novel, Roots of the Banyan Tree is forthcoming in fall 2023 from Juventud Press. Kathryn lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and curly-tailed pup. More at kathrynsilverhajo.com/ twitter.com/KSilverHajo and instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo/