Category Archives: fiction

I think it all began to go to shit after my intervention. I mean, if I had to pinpoint when things actually started to suck out loud, it was then. Me, sitting in a room while my co-workers and friends sat around in a circle talking about how disappointed they were in me. Typical stuff, I’m sure you’ve seen an intervention on TV. Mine was like that only with uglier people and no soundtrack. God, it was so quiet. The whole thing was just a big joke. I had to hear about how my drinking was getting out of hand from my forty-five year old boss who spent the better part of the eighties paying hookers to snort coke off his dick. I know this because he’s brought it up in meetings before. Several times. But I’m the asshole with the problem. I bit my lip and gritted my teeth and just took it. I took in all the words and pleas. I nodded but said nothing. What was the point? If I say I don’t have a problem, then I’m in denial. If I say I do, I’m in rehab. Neither really worked for me. Having spent years in front of principals’ desks getting lectured about doing better helped me hone a technique for looking like I was paying attention when I was really disappearing into my own head. At the intervention I began making shapes in my mind out of the bumpy paint job on those yellow office walls. There’s a monkey. There’s a man wielding an ax and a severed head. There’s a frosty mug. Yes, yes, I will try to do better. Yes, yes, I’m an awful person.
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Abby always thought she’d get used to the cold. That bitter, snot-freezing cold that defined Omaha winters. The cold you feel in your bones the minute it engulfed you. She never did though, get used to it. She hated it, and it made it all the more easy to spend her days inside. She was scraping the frost off her car with the ice scraper tool that mystified her cousins in California. They didn’t have such manual labors to start their days anyway. After clearing a six-inch view hole in her window, Abby sat inside her running car trying to get warm.
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