Like how he says it ar-shi-tect. And I’m not allowed to correct. If I try to correct, he says I’m a government puppet and where the hell is my wire. He pats my blouse to check for himself. But ha! He’ll never find it. The FBI is good like that. Taped me up just right. 

They want me to get Bill to admit how he was behind the building blowup on Third Street. Glass and concrete blowing out like a pinata. 

I’m plying dear Bill with tequila, tequila and he’s nothing but ar-shi-tect, ar-shi-tect. Star witness me, and Bill is looking at ten years, maybe twenty. That’s enough time to smack the cute off of him.  

Look at him trying to wiggle himself out, saying the building was brittle bones, like it was built to fall down. How it was nothing for him to blow it up and he’s glad he did, and he couldn’t have done it without the help of the ar-shi-tect.

And I can’t help but wonder if that’s what he was whispering in Arlene’s ear when I caught the two of them in bed last night.



Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, Passages North, and many others. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and (The Theory of Flesh.) Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) will be published by ELJ September, 2021. She lives in NYC.