Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg

with one hand while still protecting my face with the other. I glanced up; Mei was still in bed, the thin comforter pulled up over her head as if it could protect her from Nicole’s fury. I managed to pull on my underwear and raise to a crouch.
    “Sweetness, please—”
    “Don’t you sweetness me, you shit! You lying pig-fucker!” Nicole’s hair seemed to expand into an afro of rage, and her eyes darted around the room for something else she could throw. I sprang forward and grabbed her by the wrists, and it was like gripping two fire hoses open at full blast.
    In the eight months of our marriage I’d only strayed once. Our sex life (mine and Nicole’s) had dropped off dramatically since the I-do’s, with all of the horrible clichés that came along with it: the begging, the rebuffs, the fights, the sleeping on the couch. The affair with Mei had been going on for the past three weeks, and I felt little guilt at all; after an early morning chance meeting at the hawker centre within walking distance of my flat, and the not-so-obvious double entendres that took place during that conversation, I called in sick to SMU (a minor payback for the dicking over I’d received from them almost a year earlier) and we took a taxi back to her place. Until that day, I’d never pictured Mei as so flexible and creative.
    This morning, Nicole had gone out to meet her mother for breakfast and then shopping at Vivo City, and so I’d called Mei and told her to come over, hoping to get that same feeling I’d originally had when fucking Nicole in her parents’ house, that anticipation of the danger of getting caught in the act, and either Nicole had come back early or Mei and I had lost track of the time tumbling in the sheets, it didn’t really matter either way, because the result was the same. The fantasy had come true.
    Nicole screamed in my face, calling me a cuntweasel, a fuckmonkey, a douche nozzle, a buttplug, her hands slipping out of my grasp to slap and hit and scratch, and it was like trying to control a hurricane. A whimper from my left: Mei, still naked (presumably), still hiding under the comforter. Nicole took advantage of my distraction to push me away, and I nearly stumbled backward over the leg of the bed frame.
    The sudden quiet of the room seemed to make the space between us waver visibly, as if a rippling pool of water was materializing in the air. And then, I must have blacked out for about ten seconds, or twenty, I don’t know for how long but it had to have been long enough for that familiar figure, the Eurasian woman in her drab clothing and obvious jewelry, to enter the room and stand between Nicole and me. A blackout because the only other explanation involved an abrupt appearance from nowhere, spontaneously bubbling into existence within that vaporous haze, and I just couldn’t accept that.
    The Eurasian woman was facing a dumbstruck Nicole, and she said, “Nicole Tan Fann Wee, you were born at 10:56 p.m. on the 17th of November with a full head of hair, your favorite movie is Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen , you once ate half of a black forest gâteau in one sitting after being dumped by your junior college boyfriend, you have been trying to write a minimalist play for almost ten years, and you have always wanted to live in Switzerland.”
    Nicole tried to step back, but bumped into the door behind her. I had never seen her eyes so wide. “What—? Who—? Who the fuck you, ah? How you get in here?”
    “Nicole, I know he’s a selfish asshole,” she said, pointing at me. “He doesn’t deserve you, he doesn’t listen to you, and he’s fucking your best friend. But you’re very close to doing something you’ll regret. Please, come in to the living room with me.” She put a tentative hand on Nicole’s shoulder and to my surprise, Nicole left the room with her. After a moment, the Eurasian woman stuck her head back in and said, “Best you get Auntie Mei out of here.”
    I coaxed Mei out from