PARAPHILIA TRASUMANAR

The steakhouse was only moderately crowded, and they easily found themselves a booth along the establishment’s rear wall. Having ordered, they adjusted their positions on the orange vinyl seats and awaited the arrival of their repast. The day had been a hot one, unusually so, and the evening was still laden with a heavy, smothering warmth; they both downed their ice water in record time.

The steaks, two brown rectangles with rounded corners with dark, possibly synthetic, grill marks running across the width of each one at a slight angle, arrived. Joe was famished after a hard day’s work and tore into his steak with gusto, smearing grease around his flabby lips and shin, and then ripping into his platter of prawns. He immediately ordered a second and then a third. When he finished this he gulped down the last dregs of his second beer. He looked up at his wife; she was just placing the last morsel of steak into her mouth. She had only eaten half her prawns.

“Aren’t you hungry?” He asked.

“Sure—it’s just so hot,” she replied, sipping at her light beer. Joe grunted, thumped his chest with his left fist.

“That came on quick,” he exclaimed.

“What?” She asked, vaguely concerned.

“Indigestion,” he gasped, reaching into the chest pocket of his red and white checkered shirt, and removing a package of Tums. He removed two and popped them into his mouth.

After returning the antacid to his pocket he moved a beefy fist up to his mouth to squelch the first belch. Still the expected relief had not come. From his heaving gut, to his massive shoulders, to his rounded forehead dripping sweat, Joseph Voegelin was on fire. He exhaled sharply and popped another Tums into his mouth, grinding it down quickly between his yellow teeth. He looked up at his wife, who peered at him from across the table.

Then suddenly he felt another surge of warmth, this time in his lower extremities, which was not entirely unpleasant. Hurriedly he summoned the waitress and paid the check. He suggested to Erika, rather insistently, that they skip the movie and head straight home. She agreed, of course.

Upon returning to their two-tone, blue-gray and white single story home, Joseph became increasingly frantic in his desire to engage in conjugal relations. Erika was perplexed. What has gotten into him, she wondered, pacing around the house’s small simply furnished kitchen, the only room where she felt completely at home.

“C’mon honey,” she heard Joseph bellow from the bedroom, from which he emerged a moment later, bare-chested and glistening with perspiration, his round face twitching with uncharacteristic anticipation.

He tossed his shirt onto the long overstuffed brown sofa against the far wall before lurching past their matching black side-by-side recliners, stopping for a second to rub his arm, glancing 195