Not About a Threesome
by Joanna Theiss
Hope is crossing M Street when she sees Kevin, her ex-boyfriend, and his brother, Patrick, waiting in line for matcha lattes.
“You remember Patrick?” Kevin says, as if no time has passed. “He just moved here from Philly.”
While the Dachshund pulls the pack towards the canal, the brothers start in on which city, DC or Philadelphia, has fancier dogs. Hope tosses the Cocker Spaniel’s bag of shit into a trashcan.
“You’re looking good,” Patrick says, as the shit lands.
Later, Hope has dropped off the last dog of the evening and is taking rewarding sips from her camouflaged screwdriver when Kevin runs by. Stops, jogs backwards, arms pumping. Kevin and Hope had a thing about post-workout sex. No matter how much they’d been fighting, running tights and pit stains locked them in like stray dogs.
Hope’s apartment is tucked under a redbrick rowhouse. She braces her elbows against the kitchen counter while Kevin grunts behind her. She stares at strangers’ ankles through the barred window and thinks, not for the first time, about the people who chiseled this basement out of rock, how they must have dynamited to get this low.
At the bar, the brothers order Hope a Shirley Temple with a shot of vodka. It’s a joke about her being younger than them and a nod to the fact that, if you catch Hope on an upswing, she’s ordering virgins. Kevin toys with the ring Hope wears on her middle finger. Patrick touches the bare skin of her back, where the bottom of her shirt doesn’t reach the top of her skirt. The brothers argue about what music is better for fucking, whether Hozier’s too sincere, whether Jack Harlow is too obvious.
The bar closes. Kevin drives them to Patrick’s new apartment, eight stories up. Polished concrete floors and a spice rack with the tag still on it. Hope nearly loses her balance trying to unstrap her stilettos. Patrick tells Kevin he’ll go first because he’s older. Kevin says fine, but only if he can watch. The bottom is so close Hope can smell damp clay, can feel the eyeless things boring through her porous, limestone walls.
Sunrise is polluted pink, Tito’s and grenadine, day scraping through Patrick’s uncurtained windows. Hope picks up her shoes and walks barefoot out of the apartment. In the elevator going down, she shapes the story she’ll tell in this morning’s church basement. She’ll start with the dogs, the shit, the brothers waiting their turn and how one of them invited her to the bar but they both showed up. A story not about a threesome, or about rock bottom, but about the lonely crawl back to the surface.
Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a former lawyer living in Washington, DC. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Penn Review, Chautauqua, Peatsmoke Journal, Milk Candy Review, and Best Microfiction, among others. You can find links to her published works and her mosaic collages at www.joannatheiss.com and you can find her on Bluesky at bsky.app/joannatheiss.com.