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The pattern in the plush carpet was important to him. Straight lines, strict rows: small consolations for the room itself, which displeased him. The vacuum cleaner displeased him. The mind he tricked by making pleasing patterns in the carpet displeased him most of all, so easily soothed yet constantly clamoring. Well, what will it be: resigned contentment? Or permanent struggle? He unplugged the vacuum cleaner and wrangled the cord into place, its retraction button having broken some months ago. Vacuuming for whom? he wondered as the phone began to ring. That nice neat pattern for whom?
He could treat real life as a fiction, wish away this and will that into existence, manipulate the truth and toy with people’s feelings, leave off the old dead drafts and start over with a new cast of characters whenever the whim struck, trade an Evangeline in for a Barbara and swap Downers Grove for Schaumburg…he could put all the tactics of the writer’s craft to good use in his life, but I was the silly one for making a career of it.
