The day after M. called me to say that he was too ill to come to dinner, that he was in pain and couldn’t get out of bed, and his voice sounded carefully starched, like he’d primed it for this one phone call—the day after that was when they told me he’d put a bag over his head and shot himself (the bag a kindness, so that his girlfriend wouldn’t have to see the hole that was his face when she found him), and I wasn’t surprised. I thought of the time, many years ago, when I walked with my head down hoping to find money on the sidewalk, and he’d loaned me forty dollars to buy a pair of trousers so I could take a waitressing job (when forty dollars would still buy a pair of dress trousers, which, lacking needle and thread and skill, I hemmed with a stapler). I tried to remember had I ever paid M. back, now that I leave dimes on the sidewalk when I see them; I decided I hadn’t and told the story at the wake, and paid him that way instead.
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Guest Editor: David James Poissant is the author of The Heaven of Animals: Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2014). His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy, Ploughshares, and in the New Stories from the South and Best New American Voices anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters. Visit him online at davidjamespoissant.com.
Photo credit: Maggie Osterberg / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA