The Nude

I've done such a crappy job of posting lately, I'm a bit ashamed of myself and so I want to make it up to you. This little tidbit is the piece of flash fiction I did for my fiction final. It was hard to write: I had to cut it and edit the crap out of it to get it down to 300 words and it was sad. But here is that final product, which, hopefully, isn't terrible:

The Nude

The first naked body he saw besides his own was at the age of nineteen. One of boys he lived with, an architect, had his middle-aged sister visit for a weekend in April, an April so hot that the buds emerging from the sleepy dirt had shriveled slightly, rethinking their decision to sprout.

She arrived at their apartment around noon, bringing with her one piece of sturdy luggage and a gust of hot, stale air from the train station. She wore a faded pink cotton dress which didn’t hang quite right on her loose, lumpy form. Robert liked her eyes the best: they tore at him, dark and biting in an otherwise demure face. He longed to touch her, to immerse his fingers in the folds of her flesh and see for himself where her softness lay.

He did not mean to walk in on her naked, he explained later to her brother; He did not hear her when she said she was going to take a bath.

Robert was looking for the bottle of Murphy’s Oil they kept in the cupboard beneath the sink: he was going to polish the piano. He did not expect to see the sister standing there, in their mildewed bathroom, her toes pale and exposed against the peeling yellow linoleum. She was entirely naked and stood unmoving, staring at him with startled black eyes. He gazed, entranced, thinking that she looked exactly like the nudes depicted in those Peter Paul Rubens paintings he studied long ago. Her body was plump and gently rolling, the ankles that supported her thick, and solid. Years later he took women to his bed, women with bodies molded and starved to perfection, yet it was the April-time sister that he pictured as he made love to them in the darkness.