In a Mist by Devon Code-mcneil

He had been writing all along, bartending four nights a week, spending the afternoons in his study before he went to work and writing for a few hours on his days off. But he was sick of the job and as soon as he got word of the inheritance he knew he’d quit and write full-time. His grandmother had always been supportive of his writing and he liked to think she’d approve of this decision. She hadn’t left him a lot of money but he figured it should last him almost a year if he spent it wisely.
    â€œGive it time,” Laura had said at first. “It takes time to adjust to a new routine.” But by the time she went back to school in the third week of August things still hadn’t improved. He hadn’t finished anything since he’d quit and now the inheritance was more than half gone. He went inside and sat at his desk in the walk-in closet off their bedroom. The closet had been one of the reasons they had decided on the place when they moved in together the year before. He’d insisted on having a study but they hadn’t been able to aff ord an extra room. The closet was just big enough for his desk and chair. When Laura was studying at home she would lie on the bed with her textbooks and notes and listen to the classical station on the radio. He would close the door and work at his desk with earplugs in his ears. When they first moved in she had once asked to use his desk to write a paper but he had refused, claiming that he needed the space to concentrate and that she was capable of working anywhere. She had shrugged and accepted this, setting up her laptop on the kitchen table. Occasionally, when he’d come home from work, he’d sit at his desk and write something that had been on the back of his mind as he pulled pints and wiped down tables. He would have overheard a conversation. Someone would tell a peculiar story or confess an infidelity and he would do his best toremember the details so he could write them down as soon as he got home. He’d sit in the closet with the door closed, writing by the light of his desk lamp while Laura lay asleep in the adjoining room. It was nights like these that made his job tolerable. But they did not happen very often. Most of time he couldn’t stand O’Grady’s or the business majors who drank there. He told himself that the place was stifling his creativity, that he’d quit as soon as possible. He would often have a drink with the staff after closing, usually four or five on Saturdays when his workweek ended, and when he sat down to write on Sunday afternoons he was fuzzy-headed and struggled to work out of the haze.
    The last thing he’d finished before he quit O’Grady’s was the eulogy he’d written for his grandmother. His mother had insisted he read at the funeral. It had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. He started a dozen drafts without getting anywhere. Finally he decided on writing his earliest memories of his grandmother. Sitting on her lap after she’d read him a story, watching her cat on the windowsill—a kitten then—swat houseflies out of the air. His grandmother standing in her garden with a red kerchief in her hair, picking a cucumber off the vine, showing him how to rinse it with the garden hose, smoothing off the tiny green spikes with her thumb. Everyone told him that the eulogy had been moving, that he’d surpassed their expectations. His degree in English literature, all the hours spent sitting in libraries, scribbling away in walk-in closets were justified to his family by this performance. But in his own eyes he had failed to convey how he felt about his grandmother. Writing the eulogy had only frustrated him, made him doubt his ability to do what was most important to him. Now, sitting at his desk six months later, he admitted to himself that the eulogy had made him realize how much his grandmother had meant to him, even if he hadn’t beenable to