Every Shallow Cut Read Free Page A

it costs.”
    My busted nose was throbbing badly. My eyes had started to get puffy and were just going to get worse until I couldn’t drive. I had to get the swelling down.
    “Do you have any aspirin in there?”
    “Aspirin?”
    “Yeah.”
    “We don’t sell that.”
    “I know you don’t sell that, I just wondered if you had any. For the employees maybe. In the first-aid kit.”
    “You’re not an employee,” she said. It wasn’t snark, she was actually just reminding me.
    “I’m aware of that.”
    “We don’t have a first-aid kit. I have some in my purse, if you want them.”
    “Please, that would be great.”
    She vanished from the window for a moment and then returned. “I can’t find them.”
    I smiled pleasantly at her. “Fine.”
    I smiled pleasantly at everyone. I smiled pleasantly at the bank guy who stuck the foreclosure sign on my front door. I smiled pleasantly when Church was a puppy and caught parvo and the vet told me to have him put down. I smiled pleasantly at my editor when the publisher remaindered two thousand copies of my last novel and I found them stacked in the thrift store with pink stickers, going for a quarter each, and still not selling.
    After I picked up the food, I parked, fed Church three burgers, and ate the rest myself. He contentedly burped, passed gas, then circled the back seat and dug at the comforter until he laid down with a huff of air. He started to snore immediately.
    I adjusted my seat back, wrapped the ice up in a couple of napkins, laid it on my face, and let myself drift to the music on an oldies station. I grew a little nostalgic while I hummed along. I sounded almost happy.
    After an hour the ice had melted and the swelling had gone down. I got back on the road and floored it towards New York.
    I’d come out to Colorado to be with my wife. We met on the Internet in a singles cafe. I really was that guy, she really was that girl. We met face to face in Vegas a few months later and started a long-distance relationship. I’d fly into Denver a couple of times a year and she’d come out to New York to visit me. She hated the bustle and action of Manhattan and spent most of her visits hiding in my apartment with the windows shut, tossing potpourri around to kill the smell of the city. Eventually came the point when one of us had to make a move or we’d have to split. I could do my job anywhere so I went to her.
    The first few years were rough but righteous. I was slowly chipping out my career in the bedrock of publishing. I was the darling of the awards committees and won some pretty, shiny, tiny statues. I hoped the wins would translate into book sales. They didn’t. The reviews got better but my advances got smaller. The bills stacked up. We were hurting financially but had reached a delayed yet progressive spiral of debt by borrowing from one credit company to pay the next, transferring the balance from the second card to pay down the first. I knew it would eventually lead us to hit the wall hard, but I hadn’t expected the wall to rise up so soon or climb so high.
    My wife refused to acknowledge the truth and continued buying whatever she wanted so long as it was on sale. Purchasing three pairs of shoes that had been marked down 30% was her way of helping out the situation. The fact that they’d originally cost $250 each didn’t factor into the formula. Her math skills had always been weak.
    I still held out hope though. I was as naive in my own way as she was in hers. I kept waiting for the break. The crossover. The big push. The major hit. You needed an insane amount of overconfidence to make it in the art world, but it usually cost you in other ways. I could fore-go health insurance because I saw myself one day teaching at an Ivy League school and passing on my fount of knowledge. I didn’t need a European vacation because we’d eventually own a villa on the coast of France like every other hotshot bestseller. Whatever was missing today would be made