The father was reading a book of extracts from Dostoevsky focused on religious experience, and got fixated on this sentence: Accept suffering, and be redeemed by it, which seemed contrary to most anything he saw advocated in the world, where the hope seemed to be that suffering would be minimized, and redemption left in another time, another century. He tried to think of suffering when he’d read about Buddhism, but it was always a little abstract, and in that context suffering always seemed too subjective to be so universally applied. Here, though, it seemed simpler. It also gave context or voice to a thing the father had struggled with, which was the role his difficulties with being a more stable human being might have in the overall worth in his lived days. For the majority of the father’s life, nihilism and anger and rejection and selfhood had seemed to be the thing, and when the father had developed an interest in art this had only multiplied day-after-day. It didn’t feel right for the father to say that being a father was a version of “suffering,” or that being a husband was a version of “suffering,” because that seemed a tad dramatic, and it seemed unkind to the mother and to the kids in a way he didn’t like, but the redemption part seemed to sort of negate the aspects of it he didn’t like and make it applicable. Being a father was difficult for the father, and being married was difficult for the father, primarily because of his learned tendency toward nihilism and anger and rejection and selfhood, but if these were things that the father was struggling with, was “suffering”—which, again, wasn’t the precise term for it, the one he’d use, and it felt dramatic—so as to be redeemed by this life and this work, then it seemed more positive, and meaningful, and inspired by a deeper kind of love that the father felt for the mother and the kids every day. 

*

Days later the father used the weedwhacker on the lawn but it felt hopeless, after they’d done the first day of school with the kids. The mother did most of the school, and the father tried to help where possible, and although the feeling of the summer ending always brought its melancholy, there was a real comfort as they sat there working through these things. The father ordered a painting by Jasper Johns so they could say the “Pledge of Allegiance” to it, and a print of a painting by Monet that the mother loved. Now they were on the step while the eldest daughter finished her work. The son leaned against the father on the step with the picture he’d drawn in pencil and highlighter of fireworks. The youngest daughter ran around the front yard holding the tail of the kite the eldest daughter got recently. The father had cut the tail with the weedwhacker by accident but would fix it eventually. The mother sat on the computer her work had sent her, getting her work done. The father was sick but getting better because of a Zicam nose spray he’d started taking the day before. Until he’d started with that his cough had been really relentless. 

*

There wasn’t anything to say, or to do, but there was this terrible feeling as though one of these things was the thing desperately in need of pursuing. The mother told the father a thought about going on a trip at some point with the kids. The father would stay home and she would take them. This brought with it a small amount of anxiety, or paranoia, in the father. They’d had fights, recently, and though there had always been resolution there was still this sense that things could be heading towards their ending without the father even realizing it, because the father’s sense of situations was often far off from whatever others involved in the situation might interpret it as. All the same, though, the father had to accept the fact of their relationship, and more than that to accept that his trepidation originally about homeschooling, or religion-adjacent activities, had proven largely unwarranted. His instinct to occasionally domineer, then, was being met with a kind of comfort in the realization that he could let go, to a degree, and could answer tasks put in front of him, and give support, but did not need to overwhelm himself unnecessarily with thoughts about whether certain things were particularly right, or best, because the paths their kids were on now seemed to be good, acceptable paths, and although he only felt remaining trepidation because this was a family so unlike his own family, it was a manageable trepidation and not something worth warring over. In writing, The father had learned to problematize almost every aspect of his life, to see “going for a walk” not as merely going for a walk but as going for a walk to listen to lectures about dead artists, or Captain Beefheart, or to punch myself in the legs and stay up all night and fight and record myself talking and not wearing shoes and not being scared and hoping to see a bear and hoping to cut my foot… that sort of explosive thinking, or implosive thinking, of seeing X as fuel for the work, and Y as fuel for the work, and antidepressants and therapy and alternatives and perhaps one can justify them if one reads this article and perhaps one should flush one’s meds because of this lyric and my day is not my day it’s fighting and getting coffee and weird relationships and walking and walking and walking and anger and anger and anger. He now thought it made the most sense to not only not stir anything up, intentionally or consciously or not, but to work to remove the stirrer, to remove the impulse, to sit back, to observe life, and to do so simply, because the truth was not this rambling chaotic thing—it wasn’t, it was something else entirely, something he’d only just begun to see, to look at, never before knowing it was even around. 

*

There seemed to be this surplus of writers and of artists in the world, about which the temptation could be to roll one’s eyes, to think maybe half are full of shit, that nobody’s really as devoted to it as I am. The father was softening on this position the more time went on. The father thought about the books he owned, the ones he truly had an intention of reading, and those that might float between the house, the car, his office at work, or be donated someday to Goodwill. The world of wars and of money and of development wanted there to be this need for stringency, he figured, this sense of competition, of I succeed, that guy I work with will fail, has to, for they are my enemy… The father had heard someone talking once about how award shows for TV and film basically only got started because around the time of the development of the Oscars or the Emmys workers on films and TV had started to talk about pay, and unions, that kind of thing, and so studios started these awards shows to create this sense wherein one product could more fully realize its vision than another, but don’t worry, there’s always next year… The father used to walk around with a lot of bitterness at every single other writer. The father often still walked around with a lot of bitterness at every single writer. It had started to dawn on him that this sense, though, that he was failing, that he wasn’t successful, until X happened, until his name was in lights and his enemies were stuffed into a corner, then he’d have arrived, then the real writing would happen, then, really, he was a writer. He sat in the bathroom, uncomfortable in his body, and sweating because his fever had finally broken, and all he felt was a desire to extend this moment, not to spite his family because he was alone with minimal guilt because they were contented, not because he was his purest self in the bathroom, but because all was at least slightly well, there were no urges to take drugs or to get angry or to greatly alter the sum of his life. 

*

He looked up paintings by George Bellows, late, looking for late period paintings, wanting to see the things he’d painted of his family. He looked up Gerald Donald, searching for anything he could find, which wasn’t much, but he liked the search. He watched Nathan Fielder talking. 

*

They’d enjoyed doing these first days of homeschool together. The father sat on the couch showing the kids different videos of Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown” from Rodeo, and they discussed the subject matter and how the song might’ve sounded like its subject matter. They looked at Apfelbaum I and talked about Gustav Klimt. In years previous the father had felt mostly like a nuisance when they were trying to do school, but this year, with these elements that the father got easily excited about and interested in, the days felt really wonderful. The father and the eldest daughter were playing the game of Ur, which he’d purchased recently. 

*

The father bought the albums Neurotelepathy and Gesamkunstwerk by Dopplereffekt. The father looked at pictures of Gerald Donald on the internet and couldn’t shake this feeling he’d had about his work in general, the father’s work, meaning, not Gerald Donald’s, because the father compared himself to Gerald Donald and felt all his pathetic “vying” and “aspiring” was really repugnant; the images the father could see of himself on the internet, too, made the father feel ridiculous and stupid. The mother was on the phone for her work, discussing something about schooling. The youngest daughter was cleaning up the blocks on the floor and the eldest daughter was working on her Language Arts assignments on the homeschool table. The dog had perched herself like a cat up on the top of the couch, in the sun. The son was upstairs playing with Legos and cleaning his room. It was August. It was the midst of a heat wave. You could subtly smell the wildfires which had a dramatic effect on the father, almost making him wilt into a kind of nostalgia for the first days of his time in Idaho, his time with the mother, and the beginning of his new life in this place. 

*

The father told Alexa to play “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and it took three tries for her to actually play it. He took out a storage bowl and put the fried rice into it from dinner. He got out another for the chicken. The kids and the mother and the dog were all upstairs. Only the father now, the father and Aaron Copland, pledging allegiance and the father sniffling from the Zicam that worked very well. The father’s blood sugar was on a downward trajectory. Alexa started to play the “Gun Battle” from Copland’s Billy the Kid Suite and the father felt incredibly moved and compelled by the song and by Copland’s picture on the cover of The Essential Aaron Copland. The father thought, “Aaron Copland is the greatest American artist.” The father thought “I want to watch Copland.” 

*

The father watched an old BBC documentary about Kierkegaard and felt comforted by this actor playing Kierkegaard and reading his ideas about true faith. The mother worked on her laptop in bed. The dog lay next to the father on the bed occasionally twitching. Kierkegaard was dying. He collapsed in the street. Magazines published caricatures of this man who’d chosen with simultaneous arbitrariness and great decision to abandon a life he saw as entirely plausible but somehow a denial of something in him. Earlier the father watched a documentary about Camus and Sartre, the former of whom he’d soon teach. The father liked Sartre in large part because of the physical presence of Being and Nothingness in his room where he’d lived in Chicago, the white edition with the lined picture of Sartre in varied color, and because Sartre was very ugly, whereas Camus was quite handsome. The documentary framed Kierkegaard as being opposed to Marx, which wasn’t something he’d ever heard before. The father thought Kierkegaard was correct. The father had never felt particularly compelled by Marxism. The dog shook and sat up and faced the mirror at the foot of the bed—she needed to go outside and to urinate.

*

The father sat on the front step thinking over his life, the past few months, whatever would follow. The dog didn’t walk down the step and out into the yard to urinate. She just sat there with the father not doing anything. 

*

The father was in a meeting with three other professors to prepare for the semester. The room was large with tables where students could typically sit and the chairs were red. The room was a kind of abstraction. Everything in academia seemed to be a kind of abstraction. The father had received an email about the university’s budget, and this kind of thing. This building was new. The chairs were nice, their redness was nice. The tables were nice. The technology was abundant. Everything was expensive. The father couldn’t understand it entirely but he also felt a real love for this place, which felt true. The father knew that love could sometimes be like faith. The father didn’t know too much about faith. The father’s sense of faith, though, was that there was this great mystery in living. There were these intangible things. They transcended. The art the father loved had transcended or had helped him in achieving a sense of transcendence. It wasn’t rational, which sometimes made the father a bad teacher. “Just look at this!” he felt himself sometimes wanting to say. He wanted to communicate the feeling of reading something powerful. He wanted to give his feeling about The Trick Is to Keep Breathing or Molloy to a student and then to simply sit there communing, religiously. It was like a church, then, perhaps, and probably. His love for the university in America was like that, like that faith. It was easy to critique, to reduce, to belittle. It wasn’t difficult to point to the money and think, good lord, let’s abolish it. But, like faith, the thing could work, it could have real meaning, and when it did, well that was it. The church in a place like Rome, the management of various strains of Catholicism especially when it came to abuse. These were things any living human could rightly point to and rightly dissect. They would not and would never be wrong in dissecting it, criticizing it. However, for the faithful, for the woman who takes her children to the Catholic church to try and give them some kind of guidance, because she’s found something meaningful in it after a hard life, a life of suffering, and so to critique this person, and to especially critique them easily, would and would ever be wrong. Another person walked into the meeting breathing heavily, plugging in their computer. There were technical difficulties. “Frameworks” were being discussed. “Problems” were being discussed. “Recommendations” were being discussed. “Red Solo cups” were being discussed. “Videos” were being discussed. “Simulations” were being discussed. “Teaching innovations” were being discussed. “Assets lists” were being discussed. “Superhuman efforts” were being discussed. “Announcements” were being discussed. “Latin” was being discussed. “Bifurcations” were being discussed. “Adult learners” were being discussed. “Traditional grown-up working people” were being discussed. “The same topics” were being discussed. “Winter” was being discussed. “An hour of googling” was being discussed. “Course themes” were being discussed. The father felt an anxiety at first because he wasn’t sure if the classes he’d planned were in line with what was being talked about in the meeting, so he talked to his superior and made sure, and found out that everything would basically be alright. This was something else that happened frequently in academia: you felt an anxiety, and sometimes if you left it to itself you could become incredibly overwhelmed, as though you were going to be fired instantly, as though the gavel would come crashing down and you’d be tossed into prison for your pathetic ineptitude, and if you didn’t talk about it or check in with somebody then you were going to be forced to either push it down and have it transmit into some other aspect of your life, to very negative emotional effects potentially not only on yourself, but on others. If you talked about it, however, and just made sure, then suddenly you found things were OK. “AI” was being discussed, at length, trying to pin down exactly which aspects of it were likely going to present problems for their work that semester, and which aspects of it were probably already apparent in other aspects of both their working lives and their living lives. The father frequently got lost in the weeds, within academia, trying to make head or tail of these things. The father wanted to offer direct value to students, and the father figured the only way to offer this was to embrace a rather extreme simplicity. Academia frequently eschewed simplicity in favor of something that could move someone along, and the father was as guilty of this as anybody, but the father taught writing, and in the father’s experience writing was something that thrived off of simplicity. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The more complicated the world got, the more effective extreme simplicity did seem to be. 

*

They lay in bed watching a survival show set in Alaska, talking from time to time. The father looked up William Carlos Williams’ The Great American Novel, and became preoccupied with the idea of writing a novel called The Great American Novel that somehow mimicked the form and content of both William Carlos Williams’ The Great American Novel and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, but he wasn’t sure whether Roth’s The Great American Novel already utilized elements of William Carlos Williams’ The Great American Novel and so he determined to buy a copy of each of these and to figure out what was going on, including any other novels called The Great American Novel. The dog made breathy retching sounds between them. 

*

The father sat there in the morning drinking his coffee. The dog was playing with the bag her toys were usually kept in, a canvas bag covered in paw prints. It was Friday. The summer was almost over. The world was returning to its normal state. The youngest daughter was playing with toys and looking around for more toys to play with. The son and the eldest daughter were upstairs looking for something while the mother did a call for work. The father called for them to come downstairs so as not to disturb her. 

*

The father got a copy of Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga in the mail because he’d read one book review of it that made it sound interesting—the father had received a review copy of the book months ago, and this happened after he’d donated the book to a secondhand store—and so he asked the publisher for another review copy under false pretenses—he’d said he’d never received it—but the thing of it was, between reading the first review, emailing the publisher, and receiving the book, he’d read another review that basically soured him on the whole enterprise, so now he had another copy of another book he didn’t intend on reviewing—he felt bad about this—and didn’t have much interest in reading it. This was the second review copy of a book he’d received that year from a writer who’d had it stipulated in divorce proceedings that they could not legally write about their family life without the express consent of their exes. It might’ve been the third, in fact, as there’d been a digital copy of a novel by a non-male French author who’d “blown up their life” and written a “brilliant” novel about that act, among other things. The father watched the film Céline starring one of his favorite actors, Denis Lavant—whose physical presence is so compelling it seemed a miracle he even existed—playing Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who was a writer the father had once really loved, and who he still loved for certain of his novels, the stuff he’d read anyway, but whose ideas about writing and life and Semitic people and African people and the like proved to turn him into a kind of frenetic bore, like those really animated old guys the father sometimes saw at punk shows when he was a teenager. It seemed to make sense that a guy like that could write three or four really interesting books, but that they’d inevitably wind up repeating themselves pathetically in a house in the countryside. There was a scene, however, where Céline sat in a bathtub, outside, with an American academic, Milton Hindus, who’s sort of conned his way into writing a book about this writer he loves, and Céline realizes this and in turn cons Hindus into writing what he wants him to write, and out of these conflicting impulses comes Hindus’ book, The Crippled Giant. When Hindus first approached, Céline was in the bath next to his wife, who almost redeems the film and the life of her husband, and she gets out, puts on a towel, and Hindus takes her place. The notion of bathing outside with a friend in that time comforted the father. “Pure bathing culture,” was the phrase that entered the father’s head, and which he knew was the name of a band, and although he wasn’t excessively interested in the work of the band, he bought their music and listened to it because of the strength of the name.

*

The mother sent the father an article about Jean Piaget’s ideas regarding education and although he struggled to understand it he felt warmed by the fact of her sending it and he liked the picture at the top of Piaget wearing a beret and smiling crooked or potentially broken teeth. 

*

The father looked at these archtop guitars made by Ken Parker while they lay in bed watching the show about survival.

*

The father took the kids to the farmers market on Saturday morning. The summer was ending. The world in its violent awareness was growing in the father’s gut. He could feel it there. He got a coffee. The kids played on the playground as the father looked on. He tried to think about the work he wanted to do, the things he wanted to try and figure out. The mother took a shower and rested and got some work done. Her world was opening. Her work was overwhelming. Everything was overwhelming. People were all around the market, the usual paranoia of the parent who’s seen too many episodes of SVU. This was the father’s life, the writing, the teaching, all of it was here, with his kids, with the mother, in this city where he knew someday he’d probably die and he felt OK with that. He’d gotten a new battery for his father’s Tissot watch and wore it on his right hand. At first it had seemed too tight, so he’d purchased two links from Tissot and had them put in, and now he wasn’t sure if it was too big. He had a ganglion cyst on his right wrist that made it slightly larger so he wore it on the right. The eldest daughter walked down the steps on the playground and walked past the son who ran towards the father to tell him he’d made a new friend. The youngest daughter, who the mother wanted to start calling a nickname, walked innocently down the steps and over to a bar from which she swung. She wore a red dress with gold sequins. The son stood at the top of the slide with three other boys talking, trying to commune with them. A band of older women and one older man were playing bluegrass music. Everybody was alive and the sun was out and the father’s fast was almost over for that day. He’d fasted through the summer, and would continue into the fall. He thought of Frederick Exley thinking about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s meditation on driving Zelda to and from the hospital where she’d be treated. He couldn’t remember the phrasing that was used and maybe that didn’t matter. It was exactly like the passage in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway remembers the trains home from the East to the Middle West, long snowy rides through sleepy Wisconsin towns, in Exley it’s the same kind of mood, an abandonment of something, a shedding of some idea of what you thought your life was going to be, and an acceptance of what it truly was. Something was ripped from Zelda, was ripped from F. Scott Fitzgerald, on those drives, which in turn became ripped from Frederick Exley, who seemed dead set on spending the rest of his days putting it back, as was F. Scott Fitzgerald, and of course it killed them both in drink. The father didn’t want to put it back, and though he knew maybe the life inside the life might not be righted, or perhaps worse, that it might be—he felt no interest in rejuvenating anything; his life, his fate was here—“two plus two is five,” he thought, not understanding what he meant, and thinking of James Caan. 

*

The father was surprised by his emotional state. He felt raw and scared and anxious. He’d had coffee. For months he’d had lots of coffee without experiencing this, but getting closer to the semester it seemed as though the anxiety had returned. The son sat next to him on the floor in the boy’s room, next to this device called a “Nugget” the kids would play with, like a firm pillow in a couple of different shapes you could make forts with. The eldest daughter and the youngest had just run downstairs for something. The mother was on the boy’s bed resting because the Zicam she’d taken hadn’t had a substantial effect just yet. She watched a video on her phone. The dog was somewhere in the room doing something. The son enclosed himself a bit with this arched piece of metal that was supposed to help him balance and strengthen his body. 

*

The father looked at the dog and lately he’d been having the strange thought that the dog was the reincarnation of his father. He didn’t know where this came from or what to do with the information but maybe sixty percent of him believed in it, and sometimes more. The mother had turned over in bed wearing the father’s Carhartt thermal, still feeling sick but enjoying resting and watching the survivalism show. The father was listening to an interview with the writer Tessa Hadley, and felt like there was this growing wall of anxiety with the semester starting. That’s how he’d put it to the mother, “like a wall of ice” between himself and the world, a thing that stopped his “flowy” state, that had existed only days previous, when reading a book relevant to a course he was teaching, and he’d felt excited to naturally incorporate this material into the class. Now, in his anxious state, behind the wall of ice, he felt as though he’d exist in the throes of the semester as he always did, not really giving his students what he felt deep down he was meant to give them, and being anxious all the time that he was horribly, terribly shitting the bed. The hairs on his chin, high up, just below his lip, were too long, which made him feel self-conscious. 

*

He sat on the steps as the smoke came in from further west, and he could see the smoke up in the air. He listened to a lecture by Alan Watts about the simultaneous uselessness and irreplaceable utility of the artist, if that’s what it was to be, who knows. It seemed to be. It wasn’t clear. It was however very clear. The dog was sniffing around the yard and the father wondered if the smoke would have an effect. The stickiness of the father’s Dexcom was inconsistent. “The role of the artist is very fascinating,” Watts said, “the absolutely irrelevant person,” he said, “and yet it is the artist who teaches us how to live,” and the father liked to listen to this, and didn’t know what to do, and the inconsistent stick did bother him.

*

That day they’d gone down to Lewiston, Idaho to visit a museum wherein they’d watched a documentary about a local tribe, and its language, and its history, and efforts being made to hold onto that history. They’d walked around the museum and talked about different things. Before going down there the father had read from the eldest daughter’s book on the tribe and it felt good to give a physical sense to the areas being described and a sense of this world they’d been reading about. They’d gone for lunch to Red Lobster and then went to Costco to buy various things. It was Sunday. The summer was almost finished. The smoke from the wildfires was horrible and the air no longer had that smell the father loved, it was simply noxious, and the air quality was terrible. 

*

The father was looking into this idea of Nietzsche’s, who was a philosopher the father didn’t much care to read, but whose mustache impressed the father and whose apparently disgusting lifestyle and pathetic state endeared the father to him. The idea had to do with these three phases a person went through en route to a kind of transformation, that of the camel, that of the lion, and that, finally, of the child. The father felt as though he’d been a camel for a long time, looking everywhere for validation for every single thing—if he got interested in hiking, for instance, he wanted to immediately find every writer who’d ever hiked and what they had to say about it. He thought he could be moving in the direction of the lion, if he could begin to carve out his own sense of what he thought his life should be. 

*

The father could feel the skin of his mindset in the summer shedding, and being replaced by this franticness. He lay in bed next to the mother, in the dark. He’d turned the air conditioning warmer, or the desired temperature warmer, and the house was very quiet as it began its warming. He put on a conversation between Eliot Weinberger and Gary Snyder. He’d gotten interested in Eliot Weinberger by way of Benjamin Labatut, who he’d gotten interested in by accident. He thought about voting and not voting and listened to the mother’s phone. Everything was very scary and he was very anxious. Earlier in the day he’d knelt at the toilet and prayed. He’d watched a performance of the “Grand Inquisitor” moment in Dostoevsky. He’d figured out how to use his shield to ride down railings in Zelda, and couldn’t wait to show the eldest daughter in the morning. His thumb looked strange against the light in the dark. He didn’t like what he was listening to. 

*

They went out walking in the light rain. The summer was ending. The following day the father would need to go to work, and things would end. Everything felt fine, which was unique. The father was accepting and trying to be grateful for his job, which made him anxious. On the walk they avoided their neighbors who could be judgmental about their lawn. On the walk home the father got sort of depressed, and the mother was feeling stressed. It was their particular brains and their reactions to the things that happened or did not happen. Later, the father sat at the table eating from a bag of cereal with the youngest daughter. Why he should feel depressed or anxious, then, did not make sense to him. Their lives were perfect, all of life was perfect. The father thought this but wasn’t certain he believed it. The chairs around the dining room table were in disorder. On the table was a book on business writing, an empty pack of sweet crackers, and five different cups, one of which was a water bottle with a swirly straw in it, which was blue. The bag of cereal was there as well as a ceramic centerpiece in the shape of a rectangle. 

*

The youngest daughter rode around the floor on the wheeled green thing. The eldest daughter was making an award for the mother for being a great teacher. The son played the eldest daughter’s electric piano. The mother sat on the couch. The father read from a book on usage. Outside it was barely raining. The air quality had improved. Everything was gray but vivid. The father could feel an anxiety about living. Tomorrow he would begin teaching and with that begin writing the manuscript that he intended to write along with all of his students. He didn’t know if he’d accomplish it. The book would be about particle accelerators, among other things. He wanted to be a good teacher. Again he’d knelt at the toilet and prayed that day. He didn’t know if he was becoming a lion. He didn’t know if he was only a camel, a mere camel. He didn’t know if he would ever become a child. He thought he was moving from the aesthetic to the ethical, and hoped to move then to the religious. The eldest daughter handed the mother her award. They hugged. Time stood still. 

*

The father had thought about the performance of the “Grand Inquisitor” speech from The Brothers Karamazov while he took out the garbage, angrily, thinking about what it might’ve meant. This idea that you could leave this world, and leave it and be sanctified, and come back and find that somehow that sanctification meant you needed to be killed so that you couldn’t further influence the people. The boy stood at the edge of the bed watching a show on PBS Kids. The girls were sitting on the floor on either side of him, the eldest daughter playing an original Nintendo soccer game on the father’s Switch. The mother had showered, and sat next to the father in bed with her planner in front of her. The dog slept on the mother’s lap. The father felt a powerful anxiety. People were arguing about the meaning of “verisimilitude”. The father wore the cheap Casio watch he’d bought at Walmart even though his father’s Tissot watch was fixed. He felt angry which seemed to be one of the only moods he was allowed in anticipation of going back to work tomorrow. He didn’t want the summer to last forever, he knew that. He just didn’t like the pressure, but he knew it was important to try, and to be there, and to offer something to students. It wasn’t clear that night, but things seemed to be changing. Everything was changing very fast. The summer was over. 

*

Everything was dark in their room. The mother had rolled over to her side of the bed and the dog followed her. The father felt frightened of the following day, the unknown, this new class he’d be teaching. He felt hyperaware of time passing. He didn’t feel comfortable. He’d made three cups of coffee and put them into a Mason jar in the fridge to grab on the way out. It always made the father sad to leave for work after so much time spent with his family. He didn’t know what to do with that information. He knew. The dog came over to the father and it made him feel happier in a simple way. The lights were out. It was black in the room. The glow from their phones was all they noticed. So much time and no speaking. Marriage. The father liked to be married. He wasn’t appreciative enough of his life. He was always seeking out trouble, or context. Always wanting the thing that might give it shape. The father had considered going off of his medication again lately. He knew it was foolish but he couldn’t shake the feeling. He knew he needed to keep fasting and start exercising more so that his meds could have a chance at being effective before he made any choices like that. The mother had made a hard call that day to stop one of the endeavors she’d taken on when she hadn’t gotten the job at first. It weighed on her all day. She didn’t like to quit something, it hurt her heart. It was the right thing to do but that didn’t just make it go away. She lay on her side in the dark, looking at videos on her phone, trying to forget or trying simply to settle down. The dog was warm but she didn’t mind, not yet. She loved their life and she loved the father. He was not an easy person to love but she did anyway. She watched videos and felt tapped into all of these different things. She didn’t want the summer to be over, but she knew she’d struggled to savor it anyway, so it seemed to make sense to move on. The audio was playing from her phone. She felt tired but anxious. Tomorrow would come.