One night, before bedtime, my fiancée locked me in the bathroom. I was just getting ready to unzip, when she inserted a quick hand, grabbed the key, and shut the door. Now, if I wanted to, I could have easily leaped toward the closing door, and force my fiancée away from it, but instead I peed with a racket, whistling And When The Saints Go Marching In.

It was an old house, and the bathroom door had a skeleton key, with a keyhole one could peep through. So down on my knees I went, my eye wide against the cold opening. She had left the key on the other side, which was typical for the game she played: a tough hunt, but not impossible. Beyond the key I could make out only darkness.

I flushed.

As fresh water refilled the tank, I heard the bedsprings squeak under her body, and the sexy little moan she always made when she stretched her long limbs, somewhat louder than usual, making sure I knew that the beast was waiting wild. I caught a gleam of my face in the bathroom mirror, surprised to find myself there.

She was the one who awoke it between us. Some months before, while I raked dry leaves in the back yard, she locked me out of our house. I climbed in through a window, and found her bright-eyed, panting and giggling on the kitchen floor. We fucked right there, hard on the kitchen floor.

It went on like that: on a Vegas vacation I had to call security to let me back into my own hotel room, where she feigned not hearing the fists drumming the door while sitting on the balcony, her iPod blaring—our first anal sex. She stole my ladder while I was on our roof cleaning the gutters. I dropped fifteen feet to the porch, sprained my ankle, and she sucked me with a never-before gusto before driving me to the ER.

The bathroom’s New Yorker’s middle page read Onward and Upward with the Arts, and I ripped it carefully, and slid it flat under the door, just below the key on the other side.

I used her toothbrush; it took me a good twenty minutes of patient jiggling, twisting, and whispered cursing. Keeping my outer cool was key to keeping the feral beast inside hot.

The key dropped with a ping onto the magazine sheet, and I slowly pulled it in through the narrow gap between the floor and the door. Hard and hefty, I inserted it in the hole, and turned. The door opened with an anticipating squeak.

Back in the bedroom she was passed out, fast asleep. Her hand rested cold on her furry pubic hair. Her tame snore hovered in the dim light like some awful stench. Our beast was dead cold.

The next day I cancelled the engagement, and moved out.

Shaul Hendel believes that a robust piece of writing grows from the dirt under one's nails, nourished by the blood of a well-lived life, and blooms under the full-spectrum light of human endeavor. In his time so far he's been a pants-pissing paratrooper, a window cleaner in a holy city, a let's-stay-friends divorcee, a stick-to-the-point acupuncturist, a father to the amazing number one & number two, a silent meditator trapped in a noisy mind, a traveler who forgot to return home, a you-could-have-done-worse husband, and a should-do-better writer. As an act of professional rebellion he is not writing a novel at the present. His work has been published in The Externalist magazine, The Pedestal, and Pindeldyboz.