Giving Up by Mike Steeves

Author:Mike Steeves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2015-04-22T16:00:00+00:00

JAMES AND MARY

The only light in the apartment is the bluish illumination coming from the computer screen at the end of the hall. He doesn’t turn the lights on because he doesn’t want Mary to know that he’s home, at least not until he has had time to compose himself, but after taking off his shoes he ends up tripping over the broom. The broom is totally unexpected and completely invisible to him, something about its place in the hallway is incongruous and even disturbing. Still, his reaction as it clatters to the floor is a bit over the top, as if he’s been surprised by something much more perilous. ‘Motherfuck!’ he says. ‘Jesus motherfucking Christ on the fucking cross. I’m going to have a fucking aneurysm. What is this?’ he picks up the broom. ‘A fucking broom?’ Mary, sitting at the computer, waits for his little fit to pass. As it happens, by not saying anything to him she actually hastens the process. He eventually calms down, takes a seat on the couch, places the broom across his lap, and asks in his best imitation of a casual tone whether she was doing some light cleaning while he was out. But she doesn’t respond and he wonders if maybe she’s looking at something disturbing or reading an email with some bad news about a close friend or family member, her parents even. A look at the screen confirms that she’s just doing what she usually does when she’s bored or tired, which is look at her friends’ profiles on Facebook. She asks him if he had a nice break and he says that he did and that he’s feeling refreshed and ready to get back to work. Sometimes that’s all he needs, just to get away for a bit and clear his head, because when he's down there for too long it’s like he gets too close to what he’s working on and he can’t see it anymore, like his face is pressed up to the TV screen, or to the pages of a book, so just by getting out and seeing other people he is able to get a little distance and put ‘the work’ back in the right perspective. She wants to know if other people were out walking around at midnight on a Tuesday. She wonders why it takes two hours to get some distance and regain his perspective. When he had said ‘seeing other people,’ he explains, it didn’t mean that he’d been walking around and staring at strangers, it was a figure of speech, and he doesn’t normally go for two-hour walks, but it’s a nice night and he was feeling cramped down there in the basement so he ended up staying out longer than usual. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘a cat came into the apartment while you were gone.’ He asks her what she means when she says that a cat came into the apartment. The look that she gives him before he’s even

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