I Cheerfully Refuse

by Leif Enger

We’d got past our early days together and no common warnings had flashed. Not that I’d have noticed—I was lost already and wanted to spend it all on her, the days and nights, the whole foreseeable.

The shop itself was a dim stew of batteries and bruised light bulbs and ferruled graphite fishing rods alongside chisels and breakfast cereals and local spirits in glass jars, squalid stacks of magazines, bits of verdigris copper ore, a clumsily taxidermized sturgeon, a Rand McNally Road Atlas propped open like a fantasy of painless travel.