The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

Fuck. Not getting out of here. Will?

Hello? Fine. I’ll be here overnight. Home in the morning. Maybe.

A flush of fear. A pinch in his stomach. Will turned back to the bed. Saw, for the first time. Carrie’s side was untouched. He’d slept on top of the sheets, messed his side up a bit, made a little dent. But Carrie’s side was still tucked in. No indent on her pillow.

Will dropped his phone, was startled by the sound it made against the hardwood floor. And then, from downstairs, “Will!”

He froze. The front door slammed closed. He listened to the footsteps climbing the stairs. Carrie appeared in the bedroom, standing with hands on hips in the doorway. “What the fuck, Will? Why didn’t you answer any of my texts last night?”

“I—”

“What, you don’t even give a shit that I was out all fucking night?”

“No, I was—”

“Jesus, Will. You smell. Please tell me you weren’t drinking while handing out the candy?”

“I was. I—”

“Whatever. I’m gonna shower. I’m going to visit my parents. Let them know I’m still alive.”

Carrie turned towards the bathroom, jabbed Will one more time before she shut the door behind her. “Not that you give a shit.”

The rest of the morning devolved nicely from there. Will’s half-drunken attempt to clean the toilet had been just that, and a brand-new fight began in earnest as Will, on his hands and knees, head spinning, scrubbed the porcelain and the surrounding tiles.

By the time the coffee was ready downstairs, Carrie had skipped the shower and instead had packed a bag.

Once again, Will found himself alone in the house. He was sitting at the kitchen table, a half cup of coffee lingering next to him. His head hurt with each heartbeat, but the swimming upstream feeling of the morning after was—mercifully, if slowly—fading.

He’d been staring into the liquid blackness of his cup, hadn’t heard her come in, but when he looked up, Carrie was sitting across from him at the table. She had been crying, her eyes raw, her makeup streaked and vaudevillian.

“We need to talk.”

“I know,” Will managed, knowing what was coming.

“I love you, Will. And I care about you. But.”

Will braced.

“But this…” Carrie looked at him then, lingering on his eyes. “This is not right, Will. This isn’t you. This isn’t...me.”

“I know, Carr. I know. It’s just…” He’d thought about this exact moment so many times in the past year as he was sitting at the coffee shop, not finding jobs. He’d practiced it in his head over and over. He took a breath, a deep one, and he looked at his wife and began again.

“It’s all ghost stories, Carr.” Will leaned back in his chair, exhaled as he looked up at the ceiling. The sound of soft footsteps padded upstairs. “I mean, we’re haunted by everything, you know? Our past, it’s just—I don’t know. We carry it with us, always. Like ghosts.”

Will reached across the table, took Carrie’s hands in his. They were cold. She was cold, and tired, and she just wanted him. She just wanted their one-bedroom in Brooklyn, and in truth, she just wanted the last two years back. She just wanted to make things better. To make things like they were. Before. Will could feel that, all of that, through her hands, like a lightning bolt of certainty. He felt better, more confident in his rehearsed speech.

“Think about it, Carrie. The good guys usually survive. In ghost stories, right? But...so do the ghosts. You know what I mean?”

Carrie smiled, small and thin-lipped, creating little dimples under her eyes. And then those eyes drifted up towards the ceiling. Up towards soft footsteps. Taking her hands from Will’s, Carrie wiped at her eyes. Will took a sip of his coffee, felt the weight of everything drift away from him at last. On the table, his phone buzzed.

I’m gonna stay with my parents a few days. Clear my head. Suggest you do the same.

Then. Coffee and cup falling, crashing and shattering against tile. Above him, footsteps. Below him, knocking. Across from him, at the table, chalk-white, rubber.

The New Daddy

Scotty Milder

Michael sat in the short hallway between the living room and the kitchen, atop the ancient brown heater grate, and played with his puzzle.

It was an old puzzle, big painted wood blocks that slotted into a warped laminate frame. Mommy bought it at one of the garage sales she dragged him to on Saturday mornings, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was too easy for him. He could put it together and take it apart in seconds. The finished image—a crude painting of Big Bird and Grover, surrounded by multi-colored balloons and smiling cheerily vacant smiles—gave him no satisfaction whatsoever.

Mommy loved garage sales. She told him that going to a garage sale was like looking through a window, and through that window you could see inside other people’s lives. You could see all the things they had loved and come to hate. All the things that hung around their neck like anchors. People tried to get rid of the stuff, she said, but the anchor was always there. It never went away. It just got heavier and heavier until it suffocated you, like the wet smoking cough Grammy had before she died. The one that made her sound like she was drowning.

Michael didn’t know why you would want to see that stuff. It sounded horrible. Sometimes he thought maybe Mommy wasn’t such a nice person. He looked down at the puzzle and wondered if it was an anchor like she said. Maybe it had belonged to some little kid like him who died, got hit by a bus or was consumed by a terrible sickness. Like Tim O’Brien up the block. Tim had something called cystic fibrosis. Michael didn’t know what that was, except it made Tim cough up big ropy balls of snot, and then it made him die. Maybe the puzzle belonged to a kid like that, and maybe the kid’s mom