The Affair

Peter Conrad
2 min readNov 27, 2022
A picture of a classic film noir detective’s office, but the detective is a dog and there’s a shadow of a cat-like woman on the frosted glass of the door.

I was just hanging up the phone when she walked in. I’d been talking to my tail-light guy. Someone had smashed my tail light.

She walked right in, didn’t even knock. Must have read the sign on the door that said “walk right in.”

“You Hellman?” she said.

“Who’s asking?”

“Me.”

“What’s it say on the door?”

“Mr. Hellman,” she said, “I think someone’s sleeping with my husband.”

I reached for a cigarette. “What makes you think that?” Oh yeah, I quit smoking. Damn.

“He’s lost all interest in me,” she said.

“That’s hard to believe.”

“He spends lots of time away,” she said. “Without me.”

“There can be any number of reasons for that.”

“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “I’m not making it up.”

“I never said you were,” I said. “All I’m saying is, most of these cases, the ‘affair’” — I showed her my air quotes — “turns out to be nothing. Surprise party planning, working late, an embarrassing hobby.”

“I know,” she said. “I mean, I agree with you. I’ve spent so much time,” she was shaking now, “looking for reasons to believe it wasn’t true, but then I followed him and — “

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Peter Conrad

Peter Conrad is a writer and artist with a penchant for grammar and a knack for the technical. See his latest at patreon.com/stymied or vidriocafe.com