Litbreak Magazine

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.

Tom had once done his best to convince Seymour to read digital books, even buying him a Kindle for his birthday. Seymour refused to even start up the small device. For him, a book was only a book if he could feel its solid cover in his hands, could flip through its pages with his fingers. Hardcover and paperback were both just fine. E-books? Not for him.

A couple, walking in the park holding hands could just make out the top two floors of the twelve story pre-war apartment building clad in pale yellow. If they stopped and looked-up they might spot his apartment on the southwest corner. The casement window should have been open since it was the first warmish day after a long winter, but it wasn’t. The one-bedroom, one bath unit’s saving grace was a good sized living room and a U-shaped kitchen with a spacious eating nook and a glimpse of the park.