American Rust

by Philipp Meyer

Buell, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Fayette-nam, as it was often called.

He would do that tomorrow as well, a field unmowed did not stay a field very long. He would stop being the kind of punk that put everything off till tomorrow.

Five years—when you said it like that, it didn’t seem so long. But years were lived in days, and hours,

She didn’t want to admit those things but they were true, it was some rule of human nature—you want most whatever you can’t have.

If you had a certain level of comfort, which he did, you just had to decide every morning. Will today be a happy day or a sad day?

The spare tire comes out. The spare tire is you. He was not sure about any of it. There were people who were meant to die alone, maybe he was one of them.

After lying in the bed awhile they slept together again, not awkwardly but as if by routine, she was responding to his touch but it was not the same, she had retreated to some place the signals barely reached.

From what I’ve seen, the people who make it are the ones with a work ethic.