I’d decided to take a break from my computer. Normally it’s fine, in fact it’s quite a comfortable habit to sit at my desk, flex my wrists back and forth. It’s something I know well, and ever since Derek moved out, I haven’t had to pester myself with extra coffees or easy over eggs.
Today, however, I’d been on the verge. My mind was elsewhere and I wasn’t sure how long I’d been staring at the same draft for a chapter I doubted even needed to exist. Over and over, line break, semantics, taming the metaphor and is that something this character would say? Is it really? My protagonist grew fat with things he’d never told anyone and must. I’d removed a comma only to put it back. There’s a quote on this it appears I can’t remember. Being a writer. The sacrifice. My apartment bulged with stale air.
In any case, it seemed about time to leave. That’s how I ended up here. Only a few blocks away. Past the gas station, the zebra crossing. A small drugstore run by teenagers who got through the day looking at as little people as possible. School had just ended. They should’ve been home, studying.
My luck has never been the greatest. But I’ve never gambled. Never smoked. Maybe if I’d gone to church past the age of twelve, accompanied my mother in the pews. It suddenly seemed so attractive, kneeling before His grace, rather than in the right-most aisle by the cosmetics. I realised pistols really aren't that hard to hide. They shuffled me across the floor, and I focused on identifying the shapes of lipstick tubes and coins lost underneath the shelves. Wondered if those were really words, or if it just seemed so in the moment. Loose shoppers were shoved into a tight circle beneath the front counter, and all I could see were black shoes, hands clutching Nurofen, Zyrtec, small purple-striped boxes of DermAid, 0.5%. One of the kid workers kept pulling at a string in her sock so that it closed around her ankles, choking the little air out. It looked unwashed.
I found myself thinking about Derek, if I’d ever be anywhere but this cold floor. Maybe I should’ve said yes. Yes to everything. Kids. Shared bank accounts. We’d get married on a boat far away from here. Forget deadlines. Forget the sound of the sirens. Laugh it off. When the police asked me what I remembered, names, faces, demands, I told them about how I can’t stop writing people into dark, empty rooms with no way out. I told them about the light of the world just outside the drugstore window, poking through the red leaves like the mouths of feeding fish.
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