Written for Sunday Whirl Wordle. Our host is
Brenda Warren; her words for this week are
shown below. Here’s where they took me.
sighs ~ siren ~ knocking ~ still ~ centered ~ lost
slip ~ doors ~ true ~ screams ~ beneath ~ curse
The rain kept knocking on my office window like a drunk who’d lost his way home. I yawned, lit a cigarette, and stared at the water stains on the ceiling …. a map of every case I’d never solved, every dollar I’d never made. The radiator hissed. The clock lied. Another Tuesday in New York.
Then she walked in. I hoped she hadn’t heard my sighs.
She was the kind of dame who could make a saint curse his vows and mean every word. She filled the doorway like a painting that had no business hanging in a dump like mine …. red lips, dark eyes, and a figure that screams trouble in thirteen languages. She moved like smoke … slow and deliberate …. like she knew exactly what she was doing to a man’s better judgment.
“Mr. Malone,” she breathed, her voice a low siren that could pull ships clean off course. “My husband’s gone lost. Three days, no word, no note. The police say he probably just… left.” She let the word hang there like a bad smell.
I stayed still, letting my cigarette do the talking while I sized her up. The pearls were real. The tears were not. She was centered on keeping my eyes on her face and not on what lay beneath the surface of that carefully rehearsed grief.
“What’d your husband do for a living, sweetheart?” I asked.
“Import export.” She said it the way people say it when they mean something else entirely.
I nodded slowly. They always slip eventually …. a word too careful, a pause too long. She’d given me both inside thirty seconds.
Outside, the city squeals through my thin walls …. real sirens this time, the wail of black-and-whites heading somewhere worse than here. The neon from the Tender Trap bar across the street bled red through the blinds, painting her in shades of guilt. This was the true music of the city. Sorrow dressed up in something expensive.
She moved closer, her perfume drifting in nice-and-easy like, closing the space between us until the doors of every sensible thought I owned swung wide open and walked off into the rain.
“Will you help me, Mr. Malone?” she whispered.
I looked at my empty glass. Looked at her. Looked at the glass again.
“My rate’s ten bucks a day,” I said. “Plus expenses.”
She smiled. Slow and certain, like she’d known the answer before she’d asked the question. Like women like her always do.
I should’ve said twenty bucks.
I should’ve sent her packing.
I should’ve done a lot of things.
I reached for my hat.
NAR©2026
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This is “The Tender Trap” by Frank Sinatra
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
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