A Beautiful and Everlasting moment of Pleasure

The first-place winner of the 25th annual Writer's Digest Short Short Story Competition explores how lonely and devastating love can be, even as you hope for better.

- By Hanna Bahedry

Any minute now, around the corner, the pleasure is coming. Any minute now, you'll be turning the corner and the pleasure will bump right into you or the pleasure will be turning the corner and you'll bump right into it; any minute now, you and the pleasure will collide and send a tray of fluted champagne glasses flying; any minute now, you and the pleasure will collide and send one or both of you into the hotel pool and you'll both be sopping wet and everyone in their deck chairs will cheer; any minute now, you and the pleasure will collide.

It’s Las Vegas, because of course it is. This is where the pleasure lives, but just around the corner always. Here is where the pleasure is circulating, but always away from you like a waiter on the casino floor. Here is where the hope lives, not just the hope but the absolute certainty that something magnificent is bound to happen, is right on the verge of happening, that all you need to do is close your eyes and stumble faithfully around the next blind corner to find it. The less you do, the better, actually. The magnificent thing is fated, it is on a course set straight for you, you are the Google Maps destination that the magnificent thing has plugged into the phone on its dashboard, and all you need to do is be here and wait for it to find you.

Outside, it’s airless like a breath stolen straight from your chest. The heat and the diesel fumes combine in the city’s cocktail shaker like a drink no one wants, a drink left in a plastic-handled neon travel mug on the corner of an intersection wider than a pilgrimage. Under the sun the asphalt cracks and the linoleum splinters and the paint peels like skin in long strips.