by chad lutz

I’m tired and hungry as I walk in the door to my parents’ house. I stink, too, apparently, because my father stops me in the kitchen and insists I take a shower. 

“Other people can smell you, even if you can’t,” he tells me. I take a whiff of my body and notice nothing out of the ordinary, which might be a clue, so I take my dad’s advice and head up the blue-carpeted stairs to the grey-tiled bathroom to wash myself. 

While I’m scrubbing away days of grime, Max sends me a text that says, “Call me when you can.”  

I don’t take it seriously because the number of cases per day has either leveled off or gone down consistently for the first time since the pandemic began. 

22,512 new cases.  

Not good, but better than April’s 30,000/day average. 

Five hours later, once I’m home from my shift at Holiday Grille and ready, I call him up and casually ask him how he’s doing, thinking he’s bought a new cartridge or finally read my book. 

“I’ve been writing,” I tell him. 

The line remains silent for several seconds. I can hear people in the background. Several people. One of them, loud and hysterical, can be heard above the rest. 

“Is that Camden?” the voice shouts, but Max doesn’t answer, and the silence continues. 

“Macie died today,” he says, dreamily. 

“Excuse me, what?” 

The commotion I hear in the background stops. I can hear Max breathing.  

“I came home from the walk and she was just blue, Chutz. I came home and she was blue. I tried to give her CPR or the Heimlich or whatever it’s called, but she wouldn’t wake up. She just wouldn’t wake up, Chutz! My fiancé wouldn’t wake up!”  

I don’t know what to say or to believe, so I simply ask, “What?” again and wait for him to tell me he’s joking. 

But, he doesn’t. 

 “It’s her birthday,” he tells himself, no longer speaking to me but the air between us, the static over the phone. “She’d be thirty.” 

How is this possible? I think to myself. We’d just finished talking about her on the hike; had just finished our hike. We had plans, the three of us. Plans. But, life doesn’t care about plans. You plan and you hope and you rest easy knowing all things take is a little bit of time, so you keep planning and keep resting easy, believing bad things only happen to other people. Until, one day, something does happen and all that planning and resting easy goes out the window. You go to bed thinking everything will be the same when you wake up. Or, at least, if not the same, certainly no worse than the day before. 

But, it isn’t, and it doesn’t, and no matter how hard you try to fight the outcome it never changes. 

You still have cancer. 

You still have bipolar disorder. 

You still have myocardial infarctions. 

I mean, what is old? Is it thirty? Is it seventy? Does it depend on when we die? How old do you have to be to have lived a good, fulfilling life, and is there such a thing? 

“Max?” I ask. “Do you need any company?” 

“No,” he says, “my whole family is over. I’ll probably just need some space for a while.” 

And just like that, without so much as a goodbye, Max hangs up the phone and Macie is gone forever. 

I try to keep my composure, but writing loses its edge after a while, so the rest of the day is a wash. My parents and I are less than twelve hours from leaving for the beach and I can’t stop crying, so I head downstairs to be around other people, thinking that might make me feel better, but it doesn’t. Tears fall like they’ve been waiting for this moment for years as I try to explain the situation to my parents, but their advice is lukewarm. 

“People die,” my dad tells me, and shrugs, saying, “Sorry for your loss.” 

My mom, meanwhile, stays glued to the television, where reports of a possible vaccine flash across the screen.  

“It might take a year,” she says, and bites her nails nervously. “What if that’s too late?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chad W. Lutz is a speedy, bipolar writer born in Akron, Ohio, in 1986, and raised in the neighboring suburb of Stow. They graduated from Mills College in Oakland, California, with their MFA in Creative Writing in 2018. Their first book, For the Time Being (2020), is currently available through J.New Books. Other recent works appear in Haunted Waters Press, Drunk Monkeys, The Journal of Short Fiction and Poetry, and Sierra Nevada Review.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ernest is an artist living in Nashville. His artwork has appeared in numerous journals including New England Review, Fourteen Hills, Columbia Journal, Kaltblut, Magazine, and The Tulane Review. His poetry has appeared in over 200 journals including: Roanoke Review, Pinyon Review, Poetry, Life, & Times and Westview. Please visit his website to learn more: http://www.ernestwilliamsoniii.com