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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.

• Tags: Cyril Wong, Issue 15, Poetry