Likes by Sarah Bynum (electronic book reader txt) 📕

She’s using half a personal day for this. And that’s not including the hours she spent online, clicking back and forth between company websites and sifting through contradictory user reviews, followed by even more hours imprisoned in the house, waiting for the men to show up with their slip-on booties and clipboards and brochures. In her heart, she sees Slash, guitarist for Guns N’ Roses, his pet boa constrictor draped across his bare shoulders, staring morosely at a puddle spreading at the foot of his Sub-Zero refrigerator. Years and years before, when asked by an interviewer how his life had changed since the success of Appetite for Destruction: “I got this house and my refrigerator is leaking all over the place and I feel comfortable just leaving it that way, but I can’t do that, ’cause this is my house.”

The shock of the door flying open makes the dog skitter backward, but soon enough it’s on him, snarling, his shirt in its teeth, its weight pulling him down, but look who’s got hold of the Windex. So there. For a streak-free shine. Right in the eyes, buddy. Who’s scary now?

What sort of crimes are committed by an unjustly incarcerated man who’s traveled through a rift in the space-time continuum? There’s not much for our team of special agents to do if Attica inmate #17864 pops up in present-day New York and spends his days being decent. Hence the episode’s twist: Emmett Diggs is now a cold-blooded killer. Hunting down women who resemble his dead fiancée and ritualistically murdering them in exactly the same way that she was killed on the golf course. The husband locks his gaze on the water bottle sitting in front of him so that his eyes don’t start rolling involuntarily. Emmett Diggs: a saint and a predator. The husband can’t look at Lenny right now, can’t look at the whiteboard; he feels his insides slowly curdling. He’s not going to win any NAACP Image Awards for this script, that’s for sure. His first episode of network television, and he doesn’t want his mom and dad to watch it.

Oh, but there it is: her house. Home. Eaten out of house and home. But not quite yet—help is on the way. The termites chittering in their tiny villain voices: Foiled again! An upwelling of love as she turns in to the driveway and sees the white gate and the red door. It’s the prettiest bungalow on the block. The Craftsman clapboard container of their lives. Overpriced, yes; heavily mortgaged and termite-infested, yes; but it’s theirs. The feeling of four walls and a roof over your head, of turning a big cardboard box upside down and cutting out a hole for a window, drawing a door in magic marker, taking up residence inside. Safe! the umpire cries. There’s no van parked at the curb, no sign of Greenleaf; she’s beaten them home.

Finger on the trigger of the spray bottle, he backs the dog through the kitchen, then the living room, across a short hallway, and into the bathroom. Not ideal, as he’d like to take a look at what’s inside the medicine cabinet, but it’s the only room he’s encountered so far where he can close the door. Or maybe not. The latch won’t hold. The door pops ajar as soon as he pushes it shut. Which he does, without success, several times in a row. And now the dog is barking again, insanely. He tries once more, not slamming it but just pressing it firmly in that careful way you have to handle old things. He pauses, counts to three, slowly draws his hand away. The door springs open. Ridiculous. Now he’s going to have to maneuver the dog out of the bathroom and into the half-furnished guest room, down the hall. His Windex is ready. But seriously: a bathroom with a door that doesn’t close? How do people live like that?

We open on a man sauntering down a quiet block, hands in pockets, whistling “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Just daring someone, anyone, to stop him. Can’t a man enjoy a stroll through a pleasant neighborhood in the middle of the day? He pulls his large hands from the pockets of his checkered chef’s pants and wishes he’d had a chance to change into something sharp. The houses gaze back at him, cool and inviting. Maybe not quite as grand as you’d expect, only two blocks away from the country club. But still nice. Still desirable. He looks at the windows and imagines who’s living inside. Who might be brushing her hair over the sink, or writing in her diary. Doing stomach-flattening exercises in her underwear. Leafing through a catalog, fiddling with the radio, rinsing out a juice glass, all the while a man is walking by and looking at her windows. Why shouldn’t he look: It’s the goddamn twenty-first century. There’s a brother in the White House. Any one of these places, Emmett thinks, could be mine.

As soon as she walks through the front door she hears his footsteps overhead. “Doug? You’re still home?” She wonders what could possibly make him run so late. Because won’t that be noted? If he just moseys into the room after all the other writers are there? Her husband, working so hard to get this job. The multiple spec scripts, the rounds of fruitless general meetings. Finally to get a break—based solely on his writing sample! And now he’s going to be the guy who shows up late.

With the dog yelping in the guest room, he takes the stairs two at a time. “Always start with the master” is his motto. But what a corny word, motto, never to be used again, not even in his head. And it turns out to be not much of a master: the ceiling sloped, the bed unmade, the pillows strewn sloppily about. He peels a pillow out of its sham—fuck! how does he even know that’s