by C.G. Banks
*
At 9:01 he stood by his front door, preparing to leave and head back to the old neighborhood. In the light of day things he’d considered earlier seemed a bit harder to grasp, the direction no longer as clear as it’d seemed alone in bed. He bit back his trepidation and closed the door, tried it twice to make sure he’d locked it. The keys felt like a hot, molten ball of doom in his hand and he squeezed tight, thinking of poor Frodo. He walked over to his dirty Volvo and considered it a moment. It had never gotten this dirty when Debbie was alive; he would have never let it. Back in those days everything had been ordered and clean. Since she died it was anything but.
But, damningly, he didn’t see that it made any difference.
He opened the door and sat down, glanced to the passenger seat at his briefcase. He had a small notebook laptop in there with his working-life crunched down to little 1s and 0s. He used to guard it with his life and now here he was leaving it overnight in the car. Not even pushed under the seat or locked in the trunk. The image of the spiraling hole flushed through his mind again. He started the car, turned off the irritation of the morning DJs and backed out of his driveway. He looked at his watch: 9:27. No, odds were there’d be no one home.
But, after all, what were fucking odds anyway?