By Christopher Wiley-Smith

You said it while looking at a patch of dead mint in the planter, hands shoved deep into your Carhartt jacket. “Sometimes I just want to commit suicide.”

Your voice didn’t even shake. It was flat, bureaucratic. Exhausted. The way someone mentions they need to renew their registration.

I didn’t gasp. I didn’t reach for you. That’s the shame of it, the delay. I just stood there, annoyed by the cold, staring at the mud caked on the heel of your sneaker. It was dry, grey mud. Old mud.

“Do you have a plan?” I asked. My voice sounded too loud, a trespass in the quiet yard. “No.” “Okay.” We stood there. A neighbor’s dryer vent chuffed out a cloud of steam, smelling of artificial lavender. It hung in the air between us, ridiculous and soft.

Beside your boot sat the Havahart trap. The mesh was empty but still smelled of wet iron and rodent panic. Two hours ago, you’d driven a gray squirrel three miles to the underpass, obsessed with releasing it far enough away so it wouldn’t return, but close enough that it could find water. You’d spent twenty minutes researching the release site. You called it “ethical.”

You nudged the empty cage with your toe. “Is it work?” I asked. “Is it the house?” I was throwing categories at you, trying to sort the chaos into a folder I could help with. You blinked, slow. “It’s not a thing,” you said. You rubbed your thumb against your index finger, a nervous tic you’d developed that made a dry, rasping sound. Swish. Swish. “It’s just…too much.”

You looked at the back door. You wanted to go inside. I wanted you to scream, or cry, or let me fix it. But you were just checking the sky, calculating if it would rain. The asymmetry of it made me nauseous. I was terrified, and you were just bored of being in pain.

“I’m cold,” you said. Not an invitation. A statement of fact. You turned and walked toward the house. You didn’t wait for me. The motion sensor light flickered on. A harsh, halogen white, bleaching the color out of your flannel shirt before you disappeared behind the screen door.

I stayed in the gravel. I looked at the trap. The door was open, the trigger plate waiting for something heavy enough to spring it. The wind picked up, cutting through my layers, and I just stood there, listening to the plastic flap of the dryer vent opening and closing, opening and closing, breathing for a house that felt suddenly, terrifyingly airtight.

                                                               *    *    *

Christopher Wiley-Smith’s work centers on flash fiction and personal essay, exploring the psychological landscape of grief, the endurance of family bonds, and the ethics of witness. He is the author of the recently completed survival memoir, In His Absence.