Eddie has been unemployed for almost six months. He’s sick of resumes. There are bills to be paid, and he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown. Will he do the unthinkable?

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Eddie sat at the kitchen table and watched fragments of dialogue float above his wife’s head.

“You can’t spend forever in your room surfing the internet,” she said, as she stirred a pot of soup on the cooker. “You’re the breadwinner. You have to look for a job. When’s the last time you submitted a resume?”

The words spooled from her mouth: 11 point, cursive, multicolored. They spiraled upward like wraiths of smoke; spread across the ceiling and curled down towards him.

“Do you hear me? It’s been nearly six months now. How many on-line applications have you made?”

On-line job applications: Times New Roman, 12 point, capitalized. Tiered rows of words and letters, arrayed like fence posts to keep the hordes out. He ran his fingernails across them — Rataataaaat.

“I’ve had enough of that,” he said.

“You can’t afford such an attitude. We can’t afford it. There are bills to be paid.” She scraped the bottom of the soup pan with her spoon.

Bills: variable font and color, 6 to 12 point. Fine print piled like scree beneath a glowing red peak: Amount You Owe.

“I know,” he said.

“Really, how many applications have you submitted?”

He was sick of submission.

He followed the red flags — Required Fields — deeper into the thicket of instructions, and the stockade of words.

An army of little click-buttons paraded next to the multiple choice questions. He lined them up in his sights: bullseye.

“We’ll get by,” he said.

“Eddie, I don’t want to just get by.” She turned off the gas under the soup. “We’ve been doing that for too long, and I hoped, I thought that we hoped, for a better life.”

He had to answer, but the words stuck in his throat; round, bloated words that choked him. He grunted and coughed, tried to spit them out.

“Eddie, are you all right?” She walked towards him at the kitchen table.

Letters swarmed in the air — x, y, z — their sharp points and edges spinning. The room vibrated with their hum and hiss.

“Do you know what the real problem is, the one we don’t talk about?” she asked.

His gut swelled with a seething mass of words — his career, his life, his love for her — all dammed within him.

“You think your job is all you are, that you have to be the bread winner,” she said. “Maybe that worked before the recession, but not anymore. You’ve backed yourself into a corner, and you resist when I try to contribute.”

He reached into the cutlery drawer beneath the table and felt the cool, pointed shape in his hand: exclamation mark, Calibri, italicized!

“You don’t know what it’s been like for me hanging around the house, watching you crushed by repeated layoffs.”

He slid it out of the drawer.

“I think we should get out from under the mortgage. I mean, let’s sell the house. The payments are killing us; killing you. We can start over someplace cheaper. The kids are gone, and I can return to work.”

She sat opposite him.

“What’s that in your hand?” She cocked her head. “You don’t need that. Here, give it to me.”

She tugged, but he held tight.

“Let’s sell up and take some time for ourselves,” she said. “We’ll go to Ocean Shores, to that cheap motel where we vacationed.”

She was so close he could smell the soup clinging to her clothes. Her round, warm face was all he could see.

“Eddie, we’ll remember who we are,” she said.

The letters stopped spinning. They fell from the air, pattering around him in a blue-green symphony, tines ringing.

He loosened his grip, and she took it from his hand.

The words spewed out of him. He coughed, coughed them up, all the words came spilling out.

“It’s all right,” she said, stroking his face, “it’s all right. We’ll talk about it later.”

She set two places at the table, and served him soup from china bowls white as a fresh sheet of paper.

© John Bryant

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John Bryant is learning the art of writing fiction. He lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. In his spare time he likes to hike in the Cascade Mountains, and his favorite reading genre is horror.

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