Micro Prose: Five Minutes Past Noon by Melissa Ostrom

Five Minutes Past Noon

You beat me, she says, setting the basket by the door. She drapes it with her red cape to await their hunger, strides to the bed, and draws the coverlet down slowly—no snatching haste—to find his nightwear, flannel, incongruous for their purpose, boyishly blue on one so grown. Smiling at his expression, she unties the ribbon at her throat. Rather delightful, his discomfort. She will show him the way this goes and notes aloud, how big you are.

Melissa Ostrom teaches English at Genesee Community College and lives with her husband and children in rural western New York. Her fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, Quarter After Eight, The Baltimore Review, and Word Riot, among other journals. Her first novel, The Beloved Wild, is forthcoming from Macmillan in the winter of 2018.

Cover Photo by Marvin Thiel