Exposure (first parapraph)

Jacob M. Appel 

 

    Wednesdays and Saturdays are my days off at the pharmacy, but Saturdays my wife is off too, so I do my flashing on Wednesday afternoons. In the mornings, I have my weekly rap session with Dr. Quince-Martin. She rents space on a corridor down by the waterfront—opposite a urologist named Littlecock—and, after a bad storm, the entire office suite smells of rotting fish. Dr. Quince-Martin makes a point of revealing nothing about her private life, but I’ve taken the liberty of looking her up on the Internet: Her husband is Dr. Martin-Quince, also a shrink, and she acted off-off-Broadway between college and medical school. Bit parts, mostly. Uncle Charley’s receptionist in Death of a Salesman . A servant girl in Hedda Gabler . I’m holding this knowledge in reserve. The reality is that I just see Dr. Quince-Martin to keep Dawn off my back. My wife is all into head-shrinking and pill-popping and talk therapy, says it “rewired her neural circuitry” after the miscarriage, though she doesn’t seem so different to me. Personally, I find Dr. Quince-Martin horrendously narrow. One time, when I tried to tell her about flashing, her back stiffened like a coffin lid and she advised me of the limits to physician-patient confidentiality in Connecticut. So now we chat about turning forty, and my step-father’s chemotherapy, and Dawn’s harebrained plan to build an outdoor deck onto the kitchen. I don’t mention anything about showing Mrs. Sproul my genitals.

.... 

Read the rest in Sycamore Review 19.2.