An Unwanted Guest

by Shari Lapena

She can’t just throw everything aside and do what she wants so that she can be happy. Women don’t get to make fools of themselves like that. Society won’t let them. But men do it all the time. She feels bitterness rising in her heart, not only against him, but against the world. She feels so powerless, more powerless than he is. She has never had the selfishness, or even the time, to ask herself what would make her happy.

“Do you know what I call you? I call you the man-child. Because you’re a grown man, facing the sad fact of aging and mortality and disappointment just like the rest of us, but you’re having the childish, selfish reaction that so many men in midlife get and it’s—sad. Sad and unnecessary.”

He’s learned that people will believe what they want to believe. And it’s truly frightening how easily they’ll believe it.

When she leaves here and goes back out into the world, she will think of everyone she meets as having the potential for evil deep inside.