As I’m spinning my wheels deciding what to do now that The Audacity Gambit has finished its run, please enjoy a short story from the same world, some years later. This was originally published at Patreon and Comradery on February 19, 2024, as one of the stories for Flash Fiction February.
Michael was fairly certain that Ian had not left his trailer in a week. It was possible he was sneaking out at night, but going for midnight snack runs did not, Michael thought, count properly towards not holing up in your house. Ian had been his usual delayed, monosyllabic self in texts, but what stood out was that he had not sent Michael a single weird meme dug up from some abandoned corner of the internet in at least five days.
There was, as far as Michael knew, no immediate reason for Ian’s behaviour. The two of them mourned Emily almost a year before, it had been a healthy and normal acceptance of loss.
Michael froze in his kitchen, holding the casserole dish of macaroni. The heat began making its way through his oven mitts and he hurriedly set it on a trivet. Almost a year ago.
He walked around the kitchen island to where his day planner lay open between a tidy stack of paid bills and a Rolodex 2254D that he’d paid too much for because it was in perfect condition and also it had been his twenty-fifth birthday present to himself. He knew what day of the month it was but he still had to look at the tidy notation that past Michael had written for the next day. Emily gone – 1 year anniversary
Michael felt like a shit. He’d loved Emily as much as Ian, the three of them locked in each other’s orbits in the way only family could be. But Emily and Ian had always seen each other clear through to the bone, bringing out the best and worst of them both. He’d never felt resentment about it, because he was the only one of the three of them who went to therapy.
There was a knock on the door. Michael knew from the sound of that it wasn’t Ian but an idiot spark of hope still snuffed out when he opened the door to see Mrs. Ang through the screen.
One changed porch light and a polite cup of tea later and Michael was back in his kitchen, staring at the day planner as if it would materialize some pre-scheduled solution. He turned his eyes to the kitchen window. The Vasquez kids were playing in the commons. It looked like a typical children’s game with no goal and dozens of rules that would make no sense unless one had been inducted fully into the group. Their parent’s trailer seemed to be home base, or at least some sort of neutral zone. It was very probable he and Ian had played some version of the same game at the same age, across the same stretch of shared green. Would it have been his family’s trailer or Ian’s that would have been the sanctuary?
Neither, he realized. Emily would have been sitting on the steps of her aunt’s trailer, watching them play. She would have been home.
Michael put the oven mitts back on and picked up the casserole dish. It had cooled down but was still warm as he balanced it against his chest to open the door. He crossed the space between their trailers. Before he’d replaced the grass with a moss and clover mix there’d been a track of decades worn between them.
His hands full, Michael kicked at the door instead of knocking. He was gearing up for another kick when the door opened. He used the moment to regain his balance to assess his friend.
Ian’s long hair was pulled back in a clip, which was as sure a sign of ill health as the man had. There was a subtle shift to his posture as he saw and interpreted the casserole dish, and Michael realized that his friend was probably a better social liar than he’d ever realized. Too bad for him Michael was even better at it.
He hefted the dish, “do you even have clean plates and forks or are we eating this with our hands?”
Something soft flickered across Ian’s eyes and he stepped back so Michael could enter, the laughter of the kids in the commons following him inside.
This post is part of The Audacity Gambit – Serialised. Learn more about when the book was first published here, see the archive and overall content warnings here, and find more of my writing here. I’m over on both Comradery and Patreon, if you feel like supporting my creative endeavours. If you’d like to subscribe to this story, here’s a handy email box for you: