Oysters by Joy Manné

I thought the oysters would do it. Widow’s Holes, no less, from the Peconic River. Osinski delivers them every Thursday during the season.

I’d been sixteen, he was fifty. I was a cliché, poor, pretty and with potential. He pygmalioned me. I was willing. He had success and money.

No children together. He’d had a pair he didn’t like. I was the child, taken on grown up, sex included. My first sex, he thought. I’d bluffed others.

The beginning was fun. Hollywood. Parties. Celebrities who fucked me ‘cos I was his. He never found out. Too vain. Too self-centred. Too satisfied. I was the good child at his beck and call and invisible when ordered practising yoga and mastering the latest culinary fashion.

Children should be seen and not heard. All he cared about was his films and novels and none were about us. Lolita without a Nabokov. And before you could fart twice – I’ll be as vulgar as I like – he was sixty and stented. Bad heart. Weak dick. Fucking me sore with Viagra. And then colon cancer with infections.

I hated Thursdays most. Oysters taste of snot. I won’t eat them. He had me serve them like they do in Paris over crushed ice in his best crystal dish on his solid silver serving platform with Sancerre at nine degrees in a matching crystal glass. Twelve bloody oysters. I listen to him slurp them, one by one.

Just this once, a shell was loose. I hid it in a dishcloth on top of the fridge where it’s cosy.

It was supposed to kill him. I forgot he was on antibiotics. All that happened was he got the shits. And tell me who had to clean up.