Something to Live For

by Richard Roper

“Team meeting, chaps,” he announced. “And yes, yes, don’t you worry—the current Mrs. Cameron has provided cake, as per. Shall we hit the break-out space?” The three of them responded with the enthusiasm a chicken might if it were asked to wear a prosciutto bikini and run into a fox’s den.

“Wow,” Peggy eventually mumbled through her mask. “There’s something so, I dunno, static about all this. It’s like the place died with him.”

“It’s complicated. I still loved him, even though I barely saw him after he left. People think loss is the same for everyone, but it’s different in every case, you know?”

“Do come in. I’ll take your coat?” the child said, holding Andrew’s jacket between thumb and forefinger as if he’d been handed a sack of dog turds.

Andrew raised his eyebrows at Peggy. He had never really understood the point in getting hammered at social events like this. Surely you were just more likely to say something stupid and then spend the rest of the evening regretting it? Then you’d need another drink just to get over that.

They were only feet away from Andrew now, and suddenly he was overcome with a desperate desire to stop and bottle the moment. To see Peggy rushing toward him like that, for him to be needed, to be an active participant in someone else’s life, to think that maybe he was more than just a lump of carbon being slowly ushered toward an unvarnished coffin; the feeling was one of pure, almost painful happiness, like a desperate embrace squeezing air from his lungs, and it was then that the realization hit him: he might not know what the future held—pain and loneliness and fear might still yet grind him into dust—but simply feeling the possibility that things could change for him was a start, like feeling the first hint of warmth from kindling rubbed together, the first wisp of smoke.

The realization came to him like a radio signal finding its way through static: a lie can only exist in opposition to the truth, and the truth was the only thing that could free him of his pain.

He decided this should be part of some governmental scheme: that everyone should be legally entitled to have at least one evening a year where they could sink down into soft cushions, their stomachs rumbling in anticipation of ravioli and red wine, listening to chatter from another room, and feel for the briefest flicker of time that they mattered to someone. It was only now he could truly see how deluded he’d been to think the fantasy he’d created could be anything more than the weakest facsimile of the real thing.

He had to stop to wipe his eyes with his coat sleeve, smoothing his hand along the stone again. He stayed there, quiet now, feeling a pure and strangely joyful pain wash over him, knowing that as much as it hurt, it was something he had to accept, a winter before the spring, letting its ice freeze and fracture his heart before it could heal. —