Single Construction

She finds Frankie’s dirty, white socks balled up near the bathtub that drips rust tinted water. Claire knows she’s getting laid by the number of white socks she discovers around the house. All the men she knows wear white socks – Dean, Shane, Billy, and now Frankie. The more time Claire spends with a man trapped beneath the weight of her ratty quilt, the more linty, strips of cotton she discovers scattered around the floor, underneath her double bed, bunched up behind the headboard. Even when the men start leaving their shit over at some other woman’s house, she finds the leftover remnants from their affair in the form of a lone sock without a match. She keeps them in an empty paint bucket under the stairs. Claire swears she’ll make an art project out of them someday, construct a shadow box or large scale montage highlighting the number of failed attempts at relationships by hanging single, dirty socks of men whose lips and limbs she used to feel.