With the dead waiting outside to devour him, Mathew
Stevens and his ex lover try to work together to
survive.
A thousand little details went into creating a life.
Buying sheets. Pillows. A couch that went with a
handful of medieval gargoyles and several contemporary
bookshelves. A full moon calendar in their room,
Sierra Club nature calendar in the kitchen, and Calvin
and Hobbes in the bathroom. Three pairs of slippers,
because one of them was forever losing a shoe.
And when Brandt left, those thousand details cut
Mathew.
They’d bought this vase together. This vase, which
cost three hundred dollars and ended up as three
hundred pieces. The curtains? A gift from Brandt’s
sister. That coffee table? The first piece of
furniture they bought together in college. All those
items stared at Mathew, and he had to leave before he
destroyed them all, and when he left, he never went
back. Better to pay someone to put them in storage
than to look at fragments of a life he couldn’t have.
If he had to start over, he would start completely
over. New sheets, new furniture, new car.
Same him, though.
Mathew couldn’t get rid of that.
