Category: Fiction

At work I’d fallen so far down the corporate ladder that the next rung could only be concrete. Winter-cold, meteorite-solid, hanging-judge-unforgiving concrete. And from there to the bottom of a lightless well, where I would come to rest, bloated and saturated, unwilling to put down the glass and start the climb back up.

Luckily, today, he had the room to himself. Tomorrow, it’s Sunday, he thought, I can slip into the office when no one’s around and clean up the carnage I left behind. No one will ever know how badly I screwed up. That’s if I’m lucky and nobody looked over my work after I left. But I’m always the last one out of the work. I might be okay. Unless some busy body came back in to check up on me. Today, all I can do is take care of this laundry. Tonight, I’ll make my tofu salad and try to read…if I can. Then I’ll try to get some sleep…if I can.

He lays three items on the table by the bed: a fading photograph of his wife, a boarding pass, and a pocket bible. Four zeroes flicker on the microwave clock marking the heartbeat in the room.

I had bought the house five years ago, shortly after their mother had left me. As part of the divorce settlement, she bought out my interest in the family home, and I used the money to make downpayments on the country house and a tiny apartment in town. My children, who were then in college, had no interest in going to the house, and preferred to fritter away their free time seeing friends or traveling, likely courting all sorts of trouble and illegality whose worst outcomes they were fortunate to evade. They rebuffed my invitations to spend even a weekend at the house, though they claimed I hadn’t tried hard enough to accommodate their schedules.

At the end of each day, Adam didn’t know what to offer of himself to counterbalance a terror unknowable to him.