Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale

by

Herman Bloom

She turns in time to see him looking at the woman sitting sideways at the end of the bar. The woman is long, too thin, too tanned and clouded by a haze of cigarette smoke that suggests a scene from some late nineteen-forties movie where a femme fatale coaxes some slow witted man in a fedora into murdering her husband, and then leaves him to rot in prison. For his part, he is busy trying to appear as though the only interesting thing in the entire room is floating just below the surface of the scotch in his glass. He badly wants to hide the fact that he was looking at the woman perched at the end of the bar. In the last few months he has found himself looking at other women more and more; wanting them more and more; needing her less and less.