In Which Gerald is Not Sure How to Feel

There had been no one in the house, thank God, when the letter bomb had exploded, but Gerald didn’t feel anything resembling relief as he stood outside of the building, watching scattered papers and sparks drift out of the shattered window where his room had been. He felt, in fact, quite the opposite. He felt a looming sort of dread, not at all glad that he had in fact avoided the explosion, instead feeling like perhaps he would have been better off, no, should have been better off, in his room, spread out across the walls and floor as an ashen smudge to be later collected and disposed of.

The package had arrived about an hour earlier with no return address and a name only superficially resembling his own, but the phone had rung so Gerald had grabbed a cigarette and left, standing out on the sidewalk and pacing. It was his girlfriend, Susan, and she had called and said hello with the uncomfortable gravity that a speaker takes before saying something truly overwhelming.

“Hello Gerald.” Susie had said.

“Oh God,” Gerald had replied, and then a noise like nothing either of them had ever heard, like a team of trucks all colliding head on like an asterisk, or maybe like a safe, falling from some great distance through a long series of plate glass windows. Gerald had been thrown off of his feet and yet somehow the cell phone landed next to his head so he could hear Susan say, her voice the very encyclopedic example of bewilderment, “What the hell was that?!”

Gerald took the phone up, still lying prone on the ground. He ignored his injuries as best he could. (His estimation: one twisted ankle, two, maybe three broken ribs. Numerous cuts and bruises.) “Susie,” said Gerald. “I think my apartment just exploded.”

In a rush to say her piece, Susan either didn’t hear or simply ignored his words. “I’m breaking up with you.”

Gerald paused, unsure of what to say, and then repeated himself. “Susie,” he said. “I think my apartment just exploded.”

“What?”

“My apartment. It- it exploded.” He suddenly felt very ridiculous and unsure of how to continue, tried to further emphasize his point, saying “As in, like… boom.”

She said nothing in response, but Gerald could hear low, throaty noises and the tiniest sounds he imagined was the sound of her grinding her teeth. He thought about how her face scrunched up when she was angry, how her eyebrows remained level as her eyes squinted, the mouth a thin line below. He imagined she was doing the little twitchy thing she did with the corner of her lips that he found extremely cute for no reason apparent to him and had learned to never mention.

Susie hung up the phone, and Gerald, lying on the ground, gave it a look of utter and complete confusion before shutting the clamshell with an audible click.

He didn’t get up, choosing instead to continue lying on the ground as the breeze scattered ash and soot around him.