Flash Fiction 3rd Place: My Real Husband by Laura Besley

I’d almost forgotten I was married before until driving home today, after dropping the kids off and doing the weekly shop, a song came on the radio, our song, a big disco remix that they don’t usually play on the grown-up radio station I listen to these days, but it’s a stand-in DJ and I crank up the sound and wind down the windows and don’t indicate right when I should to go home but keep driving and driving with my hair whipping round my face and catching on my lip balm, the only form of make-up I wear nowadays, not like the full-on theatre look I had going on when the HUSBAND in my mobile phone was my gay best friend, Tyler, and I was WIFE in his phone and that is how we got married, and it was real, even if we didn’t share a bed or bodily fluids, we loved each other, supported each other through break-ups and make-ups, lent each other money when one of us had blown the weekly budget on a sequined top or a pair of shoes, lived and worked together for years until he graduated from uni and got a career and left me working full-time in the same shitty dead-end job I’d been in the whole time I’d known him, so the first summer he was gone, because I was bored and lonely, I took up with the guy in the warehouse who kept asking me out and by the next summer I was pregnant and Tyler was somewhere that wasn’t here, his messages becoming less and less frequent, and by the following summer my kid had dropped my phone down the toilet and it was before you could retrieve your contacts from some unnatural cloud in a sky that doesn’t even exist and Tyler never got in touch either and my HUSBAND was gone and instead I got a real husband who put a ring on my finger in a church while I was wearing a white dress, even though our daughter squirming on my mother’s knee was proof enough I was no longer a virgin, and I guess I forgot, I forgot that we used to watch Will & Grace on Friday nights, pretending to be them, pretending that we too were living in the glamour of New York, I had another baby and forgot that we used to go out and dance until one of us, usually him, begged to go home because of blister-hot feet, and there we’d lie on the floor, feet propped up on the sofa, cups of tea by our heads until we needed toast and showers and off to work we went, the big disco remix still pumping through our veins, and when the song finishes today, I park up, turn the radio off and I cry and cry and cry and don’t move for the longest time, knowing all the while, the ice cream is melting in the back of the car.