The Rub

by Colton Huelle

Honorable Mention, Waasnode Fiction Prize, selected by María Alejandra Barrios

A few weeks into lockdown, the outlets in my living room stopped working. I might have tried to just make do, as I had with the shower that didn’t drain or the freezer that had been colonized by frost. But my living room was where I took my Zoom calls, and without my ring lamp, my boss told me that I looked like an anonymous informant in a crime documentary. So, I called my landlord.

“Tell ya what, Hal,” he said. “Have you met Maverick Jackson, down in 1B?”

“Briefly.”

“You know he’s an electrician, right? Sometimes I have him do little jobs for me. I’ll see if he’s around tonight.”

A few hours later, Maverick was standing in my doorway, flashing me this crazy chimpanzee smile, which, combined with his flat, boxy haircut, brought to mind the worst school picture of your life.

We’d met once, a few months earlier, when he dropped by to welcome me to the building. “Maverick Jackson at your soy-vice,” he’d announced when I opened the door. As a housewarming gift, he’d brought me a six-pack of Bud Light. He was fidgeting in a way that told me he was a little too eager to make a new friend. So, I took the beer and his phone number, and did my best to avoid him after that.

I had decided to remain aloof and business-like. “Hello, right this way,” I planned to say. No smile. I would point out the problematic outlets, and then retreat to my desk chair, where I would read a book, or pretend to, until he was finished. I would then tip him twenty dollars, so as to say, “Thank you for your soy-vice, and also, we are not friends.”

I was feeling particularly grumpy that day. I’d been suffering some gnarly bouts of stomach pain and diarrhea, and I’d woken up that morning in rough shape. Just before Maverick arrived, I sliced my thumb trying to open one of those stupid blister packs of Imodium.

But this was four weeks into quarantine, and I wasn’t prepared for how good it would feel to have someone standing in my doorway, even Maverick Jackson. He was wearing cargo shorts and one of those dopey Life is Good t-shirts that featured a smiling golden retriever with a speech bubble that read: be the person your dog thinks you are.

“Hey there, Maverick!” I exclaimed.

“Hi, Hal,” he said, frowning. “The problem’s in the living room?”

“Sure is.”

For twenty minutes, he crawled around the floor in the living room, yanking wires from their hiding places and inspecting them, while I tried to make small talk.

“How long have you been an electrician?” I asked.

“I started my apprenticeship last year.”

“What were you doing before that?”

“This and that—oh, balls!”

He had dropped whatever little tool he had been using into the wall cavity, and I thought that would be the end of our conversation. But he soon retrieved it, and when he did, he continued talking.

“I was in college for a hot minute, but it was too much sitting and too much thinking. I’ve always been good with my hands.”

“Listen,” I said and paused, not yet sure that I was going to say what I had it in my mind to tell him. “I’m sorry for being so stand-offish. It was nice of you to welcome me to the building. I’ve just been a little overwhelmed with work.”

This wasn’t entirely false. I’d moved to Boston for a job with a tech startup that applied machine learning to education games. Th e work was easy enough, simple data-entry, but what overwhelmed me was trying to break into the friend group of the MIT-nerds-turned-tech-bros that I worked with, who moved about the office in Adderall-induced fugue states and took little notice of me. Meanwhile, I knew from their Instagram stories that they all hung out together on the weekends, mostly day-tripping to microbreweries across New England and ranking them on a scale of 0-10, one decimal point. That or they were glow-bowling, whitewater rafting, attending Sox games, whatever. They must have noticed that I had viewed these stories, and it seemed deliberately cruel that they hadn’t thought once to include me, if only out of pity.

“Let there be light,” Maverick exclaimed a few minutes later, as the ring lamp, clamped to the edge of my desk, came to life.

“Hell yeah,” I half-shouted, pumping my fi sts toward the ceiling. “I really appreciate it, man. Can I get you a beer?”

Maverick was now back on his feet. He rubbed his chin and weighed the pros and cons. “Yeah, all right,” he said at last.

The Bud Lights that Maverick had brought me months earlier were still in the back of my fridge—I’d taken to buying myself craft beer in case I ever had my coworkers over—and I went to fetch them. When I returned, Maverick had taken a seat on the couch. I asked if he wanted to watch something on Netflix.

“I’ve had enough TV lately,” he said. “Honestly, I’d be happy to just shoot the shit for a while. How’s working from home going?”

“It’ll be better now that my ring light’s working,” I said. “But really, it’s not much different. When we were in the office, everyone kinda did their own thing all day anyways. I think the point of being there in person was to brag about having a poor work-life balance.”

Maverick let out a wonderfully rich belly laugh that began as a deep, manly guff aw and crept up the scales, rising in pitch until it tapered off  with a shrill, diminishing hehehe. When I realized that I had said something funny, I laughed too.

But then the beer wasn’t sitting well in my sour stomach, and soon I was fumbling to open another Imodium. Maverick asked me how long I’d been having stomach pain. I said that it had started around the same time as the pandemic, or maybe just a little before. He pointed out that at least stomach stuff  didn’t seem to be a Covid symptom. A new wave of nausea made me groan. Maverick looked at me with something tender in his eyes.

“Would you like me to rub your tummy?” he asked.

I had just taken a sip of water, which I then spewed out onto the coffee table.

“I know it sounds funny, but it helps to redistribute the acidic juices that build up in your stomach,” he added. I kept staring at him, waiting for the punchline. “It’s something I used to do for my buddies when they were hungover.”

I imagined myself lifting up my T-shirt and saying, “have at it pal.” I imagined his knobby knuckles pumping like pistons all across my stomach, and it did sound…nice? But what did it mean to be a guy who was into getting his tummy rubbed? Was that something I wanted to be known for?

So, I just laughed and looked at him sort of puzzled.

“Might help,” he said, shrugging.

My stomach roiled once again, and I nodded. “Yeah, okay, why not?” I said, no longer concerned with anything beyond what was happening in my body.

I lifted up my shirt. At first, he just placed his hand on my stomach and we both watched as it rose and fell with my breath. Then, as my breathing slowed, his fingers began pulsing into my skin. I closed my eyes. For a surreal moment, I felt as though his hand was my own—as if I had nerves in his fingertips that were sensing the various textures of my stomach: hair, muscle, flesh, and belly button.

…

The next morning, on a Zoom call, Quincy, my boss, reprimanded me for not having picked out my “quarantine thing.” Two weeks earlier, he’d come up with the idea that we should all pick up new hobbies or skills. This would help us stay dynamic during these difficult times, he said. At the beginning of every Zoom meeting, he’d ask us to give him updates on our “quarantine things.”

I was the only one who hadn’t found his yet.

Quincy was rediscovering his love of DJ-ing. He asked us to call him Q-Ray, the handle he’d adopted when he DJed for the MIT radio station way back when.

Jonas, the CFO, was learning how to make yogurt.

Mattie and Sarah, a married couple who spearheaded AI development, were taking Chris Hadfield’s Masterclass on space exploration.

Audrey had recently started a YouTube channel for her yoga videos. She worked three days a week as an administrative assistant. She was also Q-Ray’s big sister—that was how she introduced herself when we’d met. Sometimes I thought about falling in love with her.

“You just gotta pick something, man,” Q-Ray was saying. He took a long sip from a ceramic penguin mug. The silliness of the penguin somehow made the scolding worse. “What’s been bringing you joy throughout all this?” he asked me.

“Joy?” I repeated, pretending to think. The stomach pain, which Maverick’s tummy rubbing really had helped, was now returning with a vengeance. “I’m sorry, Q-Ray, I just haven’t been feeling well. It’s not Covid. It’s like a stomach thing. I think I might have a gluten allergy, or something. So maybe I could start getting into gluten-free baking?”

“I love it,” said Q-Ray. “I’m sorry to hear about your tummy though.”

Everyone laughed, and Q-Ray asked Matt ie and Sarah if they’d fixed the glitch in one of our pre-K alphabet games. Whenever I noticed anyone typing, it filled me with dread and the suspicion that they were all private messaging each other about how I liked having my tummy rubbed. I knew it was ridiculous. How could they have known? Unless I’d left my camera on? Or what if Maverick knew someone who knew someone who—

A few hours later, the pain was flaring up again. The Imodium was worthless, so I texted Maverick, asking what he was up to that night.

“Tummy trouble?” he responded, along with a laughing emoji.

Not wanting anything in writing, I answered with a beer emoji.

…

That night, while Maverick worked his magic, I asked him how he got into tummy rubbing.

“My father was a drinker,” he said. I tried to make a noise that would encourage him to continue, but maybe it sounded too grave, because he just laughed and said, “nah, he wasn’t a mean drunk. He didn’t hit me or nothing.”

This was a relief to hear. Listening to other people’s trauma made me feel inadequate. It reminded me that I had no trauma, which is to say that being alive was a game I was playing on beginner mode and still losing.

“But sometimes he’d come home at one or two in the morning and start belting ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ or ‘My Way.’ Or one time, he came in and just started dropping plates on the kitchen floor, one aft er another, until my mom got out of bed and stopped him. Things like that.”

“Damn,” I said.

“And when I was six or seven, that kinda shit would freak me out, ya know? But my sister, she was eight years older. And whenever he got like that, she’d come sit on my bed and start talking to me. Sometimes she’d tell me stories, sometimes she’d sing, sometimes she’d just talk about her day. Anything to distract me. And while she talked, she rubbed my tummy.”

“Did you rub hers?”

“Not then. I did later, when I was old enough to be there for her when she was going through some pretty heavy shit herself. But that’s another story. Anyways, in high school, I started doing it to my friends when they were hitting some hard traveling or whatever.”

“Hard traveling?”

“Yeah, like rough patches—breakups, deaths, fights with family, that sort of thing. Or just when they were feeling busted and janky for no good reason.”

The words “busted and janky” shook me. I found myself wondering if Chantelle Green would have understood me—after taking my virginity in my dorm room freshman year and asking me what I was thinking about—if I had said that I was disappointed because I had hoped that sex would finally cure me of feeling busted and janky for no good reason? Would she still have broken up with me, three months later, on the grounds that I wasn’t capable of “getting real” with her?

“I think I’ve felt busted and janky my whole life,” I blurted out.

Maverick stopped rubbing, and for a second his hand hovered an inch or so above my stomach. “How do you mean?” he asked. I arched my back to press my tummy into his palm. He smiled and resumed the rub.

I told him a story about the first time I felt busted and janky.

“I was in middle school, and I had to stay after for extra-help with my math teacher, Mr. Henry. Afterwards, I was sitting out in front of the school, waiting for my dad to pick me up, and thinking about this frustrated huffing noise that Mr. Henry always made when I answered his questions wrong. I kept replaying that soundbite in my head, and it made me feel so small and stupid that I started crying. So then my dad pulls up in his truck, and he sees that I’m crying and says, ‘I’m gonna go pick up some chew at the 7-11. I’ll give you some time to collect yourself.’ And he just drove off and didn’t come back for like twenty minutes.”

Despite the ugliness of the memory, talking about my dad made me miss him, and in missing him, I felt guilty for speaking ill of him. I became possessed by an insane certainty that he was going to get Covid because I didn’t appreciate him enough. Yes, he was dying, and my mom too, and if there was such a thing as a soul mate, mine was probably taking her last, rattly breath. No one would ever know how good I might be at loving someone.

I didn’t realize I was crying until Maverick asked me, “what are you feeling right now?” He sank down on the couch until we were level. He began modeling deep breaths because I was hyperventilating.

When my breath returned to me, I said, “I’m scared, Maverick. I’m scared all the time.”

Maverick nodded, and he kept rubbing. Before long, I began to feel better.

…

This was our quarantine. Eventually, I did end up going gluten free, and my symptoms disappeared. But by then, stomach pain was beside the point. Maverick came up to my apartment two or three nights a week. We’d split a six pack, and he’d rub my tummy while I told him stories from my childhood. I was trying to figure out why I always seemed to feel busted and janky inside.

One night, as I lifted up my shirt to let him do his thing, I asked him, “Do you remember the other night how I told you that I didn’t know how to ride a bike?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I do. Only, sometimes I forget because I lied to my friend in middle school and told him I didn’t, and I’ve kept it up ever since.”

With his other hand, he cracked open a beer. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Th is friend’s name was Josh Robideux. We started hanging out the summer between 7th and 8th grade, and I couldn’t really believe it because he was one of the most popular kids in school. But we were both really into Th e Doors, so he invited me over to play guitar together and maybe start a band. Except we both sucked at guitar, so we got bored pretty quickly, and he wanted to go ride our bikes to the sand dunes to meet up with these high school kids he knew who might have pot. So he told me to take his sister’s bike. She was a grade ahead of us—also extremely popular. I panicked and blurted out that I didn’t know how to ride a bike.”

“Because you didn’t want to be seen on a girl’s bike?”

“No. Because I kept imagining his sister coming home and finding her bike missing and asking her parents, ‘where’s my bike?’ and them telling her that Hal Lewis had borrowed it and her being like ‘what? that fucking loser has his balls on my bike seat?’ and it was easier to say that I couldn’t ride a bike than to face that scenario.”

“What happened?”

“He rode his bike out to the sand dunes without me, and I watched Jeopardy with his parents until my mom came to get me.”

“Mmm.” Maverick nodded. His eyes bulged owl-like, and I couldn’t tell if he was very drunk or very wise. Beneath my shirt, his hand slowed down even more and added in a little scratching around my belly button. The scratches weren’t always part of it, so when they came, it was a fun surprise. “It hurts less to get rejected for who we aren’t than for who we are, doesn’t it?” said Maverick.

…

I probably cried more during the summer of 2020 than at every other point in my life combined. Maverick told me it was the acidic stomach juices leaving my body. All through the summer, Maverick rubbed and listened, and I oft en considered att empting to reciprocate. But he never asked, and I still felt like something of an apprentice. Tummy rubbing was a power I didn’t yet feel capable of wielding.

In the fall, whispers of a vaccine made it possible to think of a future again. Covid had been a nightmare, but now it felt like a nightmare in which you knew that you were dreaming and could take solace in the fact that you’d eventually wake up. Mostly, this was a good thing, except I couldn’t figure out how Maverick fit into any back-to-normal life I might want for myself. I still wanted to become friends with Q-Ray and all of them, and what would they think of Maverick? The tummy rubbing was nice, but it didn’t change the fact that Maverick, with his Life is Good shirts and his middle-school haircut, really just wasn’t cool. Nobody at work would understand why I was friends with him. No, there was no future for Maverick and me. A quarantine thing, I decided.

“I’m going to throw us the biggest fucking rager when this is all over,” Q-Ray vowed during a Zoom call. He pantomimed scratching a record, and we all cheered him on at various rates of delay. “Hal, you better be ready with those gluten-free brownies, big dog.”

“You know it, chief,” I answered.

A few days later, Audrey from work added me on Instagram.

“Let me see her,” Maverick demanded as he rubbed my tummy. He scrolled through her photos with his free hand. “Wow-ee,” he said. “Look at those abs.”

The next day, while out on a walk, I came across a tower of Campbell’s tomato soup cans that someone had erected above a sewer grate. I posted a picture of it on Instagram with the caption: “Th is is Art, this is important.” She commented with the heart-eye emoji. The next day, I did the same for her post-yoga selfie.

The read-receipt appeared beneath my response almost at once, and when it did, I regretted my whole life. Her heart-eyes were for the soup tower, not me. In contrast, my heart-eyes were clearly ogling her stunning physique. Too forward, I feared. Red flag.

But a few hours later, she messaged me, “heyy.”

“Two ys is a flirty greeting,” Maverick suggested. “She wants the business.”

I had not given anyone the business in over a year and a half, and that last time had been a disaster, which I recounted in all its shameful details to Maverick.

“Ah, you gave her the old two-pump chump, did you?” He patted my tummy. “Well, you’re hardly the first. It happens to most guys at some point.”

“To you?”

“Sure. How’s your tongue game?”

“Oh, you mean…that. I’ve never really—”

Maverick’s jaw dropped. “What’s wrong with you, man? You gott a give back, Hal.”

I hung my head, dog-faced, and thought about the three women out there for whom I would always be the worst sex they ever had. But then Maverick roared that wonderful laugh of his and playfully cuff ed me on the chin. “Focus on her,” he said, “and you’ll be less in your head about what’s going on with you. Think about it.”

…

Shortly after that, the tummy rubs slowed down to a rate of about once every other week. Maverick began spending most weekends up in New Hampshire with his mom and sister. Occasionally, he’d allude to some family trouble. When he was around for a rub, he seemed preoccupied and didn’t ask as many questions. I was worried about him, but I figured he’d tell me more when he wanted to.

Besides, I was busy working out how to escalate my exchanges with Audrey from touch-and-go Instagram messages into a sustained conversation. “What are your biggest pet peeves?” I’d ask. And: “What are you most excited to do when the world opens up again?” But her response time in fielding these questions varied wildly, and we never gained much traction.

I called Maverick for advice. He was in New Hampshire, and he answered the phone in a reedy, worn-down voice. “I can’t talk long,” he said. But he stayed on long enough to listen to me spin out about how I seemed to be losing momentum with Audrey and how it was going to fizzle out because I couldn’t keep her interest—

“Ask for her number,” he said. “Tell her that you’d like to talk on the phone and get to know her. Girls like it when you’re direct.”

But then Q-Ray announced a date for the long-anticipated work party, and I figured it would be better to just talk to Audrey then. I made a list of things to ask her about: her yoga channel, embarrassing stories about Q-Ray, what it was like to go to boarding school…  

I sent her a message on Instagram: “you stoked for the party?”

Three days passed, and she didn’t respond. Because why would she? She must’ve had much cooler guys than me interested in her. Musicians, or film students, or yoked shipyard workers who could give her the business without even thinking about it.

I called Maverick, but he didn’t answer.

And then, finally, she responded, “heyy see u there!”

…

On the day of the party, I woke up at noon to three missed calls from Maverick. Half-asleep, I called him back, and when he answered, he sounded like someone who had been buried alive. “Hello?” he barely managed to gasp.

The sleeping half of me snapped out of a disintegrating dream, and I shot upright in bed. “Maverick, what’s wrong?” I demanded.

He answered, between bouts of sobbing, that his sister was in a coma. She had overdosed the night before, and the doctors couldn’t say for sure that she would pull through. In the background, I heard a weary, distorted voice calling Dr. Crispin to the ICU. I heard Maverick wheezing—his abortive attempts at deep breathing.

“What do you need?” I asked, but in the same instant, Audrey’s face flashed in my mind, and all I could think while I waited for him to answer was: Please say, “nothing.”

“I’ll text you,” he said.

…

Life had been cruel to Miranda Jackson, Maverick’s older sister. Her teen years had been turbulent and enveloped in a foggy cocktail of pills and coke. Th en, in her early twenties, she broke up with a boyfriend because she was gett ing clean, and he had no plans to. He threatened to kill himself, and then he did. She was inconsolable and came very close to hitting up her dealers, whose numbers she hadn’t yet brought herself to delete from her phone. But then Maverick showed up at the door of her camper with a sleeping bag and a suitcase. He was just fifteen years old but had managed to convince his mother—by that point, his dad was long out of the picture—that Miranda needed him more than she did.

Sometimes Miranda would open up to Maverick, would let him rub her tummy as she worked through her grief. She didn’t feel guilty, she swore through tears. She had done what was healthy and safe for her. But in the next breath, she’d break down again, and call herself a killer, or say that he deserved a second chance way more than she did. Other times, she pushed Maverick away. He was just a kid, she told him, and he didn’t know the first thing about shit.

But Maverick stayed, and he rubbed, and in slow, excruciating steps, Miranda came back to life. And she did so without once turning back to the pills, she’d later say when telling friends and family about how her kid brother saved her life. Maverick knew this wasn’t true, but he agreed that it made for a better story. And she really did get clean soon after, so what difference did it make?

I pieced this all together, more or less, from the string of seventeen text messages that Maverick sent me after we got off  the phone. The last of these read: “been at hospital for 12 hours…doc just said he still doesn’t know when or if she’s waking up.” He didn’t say it in so many words, but he needed me there with him, to wait by his side in the hospital chapel, through a sleepless night if need be.

But then, my phone buzzed again. Audrey had sent a picture of her, Q-Ray, and a woman I recognized as Q-Ray’s girlfriend, standing in front of a pyramid of craft  beer. “Party time!” the accompanying message read. I read through Maverick’s texts again and again, looking for loopholes, for excuses. What about those other buddies back in New Hampshire whose tummies he’d rubbed through hard traveling? Let them answer the call. Let them show up for their friend.

I typed a response to Maverick: “I’m so sorry, man. I really wish I could be there for you, but I’ve got the work party today (finally seeing Audrey!). I’ll def call you after though.” The words looked ugly, but I sent them.

…

An hour later, I took an Uber to the party, which was being held at Q-Ray and Audrey’s parents’ place, a near-mansion out in Newton. I recognized Q-Ray’s silver Tesla from his Instagram stories. When I walked around to the backyard, I found Audrey hanging purple streamers from an elm tree. I wanted to press my face into the red linen of her dress.

“Hal?” she said, sounding surprised to see me. “You’re early.”

Mortified, I checked my watch. “I thought it started at five,” I explained.

“Silly Hal,” she said biting her lip. “It was six. Actually, it’s good you’re here. Quincy—I’m sorry, Q-Ray—got into a fight with his gulfwend, and now he’s having a wittle cwyy in his bedwoom.” She pointed up to a dormer window that jutted out of the roof. Then she started laughing, looking as if she expected me to join. She seemed disappointed when I didn’t and went back to hanging decorations. She asked me to hold one end of a string of paper lett ers that spelled CELEBRATE, which we hung between two bird feeders.

“Well, I think this is about as good as it’s gonna get,” she said, looking around the backyard. “Wanna go inside and watch something?”

In a daze, I followed her into the house and down an impossibly long and well-lit hallway, its walls cluttered with framed photos—awkwardly staged family portraits, mostly. One showed Q-Ray, acne-ridden and scowling, holding with both arms a paper bag overflowing with red apples.

At the end of the hallway, just as we were about to reach the living room, we came to the bott om of a bright wooden staircase. “Maybe I should go see how Q-Ray’s doing,” I said.

Slowly, with theatrical relish, Audrey came to a halt and turned to face me. She blew a tendril of hair out of her eye. “Okay?” she said. But I didn’t move right away. For a second, I thought about saying something like, “Yeah, never mind, that would be weird, right?”

She widened her eyes, so as to ask: well?

“I’ll be right back,” I finally muttered before turning to head up the stairs.

The door to Q-Ray’s bedroom was open, and I found him lying facedown on his mattress beneath a Wu-Tang Clan poster that hung over his bed. I knocked tentatively on the door. “You okay, Q-Ray?” I asked.

“Obviously not, Hal.”

“Do you want to talk about it, maybe?”

He didn’t respond, so I just stood in the doorway, shuffling my feet so the noise would let him know that I was still there. Meanwhile, I became aware of the penguins: glass penguin figurines standing in a neat and orderly row on a floating shelf above the light switch; a stuffed penguin at the foot of the bed; tiny pewter penguins that looked like Monopoly pieces; penguin postcards from various zoos thumbtacked to a giant corkboard. I recalled the ceramic penguin mug I’d often seen him drinking from. There was still so much tenderness left  in the world if you looked for it.

I sat down beside him on the bed, and he rolled over. “I think my girlfriend and I are breaking up,” he said. “I told her that I wanted to make a website and start a DJ business on the side, and she laughed at me and said I was being super cringe. And I was like, ‘babe, I’m serious, this means a lot to me.’ And then she and Audrey ganged up on me and started with the baby voice shit, and it all just made me feel so, so—”

“Busted and janky?” I suggested.

Q-Ray nodded. “Exactly, and it just made it crystal clear that this woman, who I’m supposed to spend my life with, doesn’t respect me and is probably only with me cause I have money and drive a Tesla and shit. And like, the one time I show her another side of me—wait, what are you doing?”

My hand was on his tummy. “Deep breaths,” I told him. I began to rub, gradually adding in little scratches when I reached his obliques.

Q-Ray looked at me, terrified and coddled. His eyes welled up again. “Feels nice, whatever it is,” he said.

“This is my quarantine thing,” I told Q-Ray.

“Why didn’t you say so in the meetings?”

I hesitated, and my hand stopped moving. I couldn’t sort out everything I was feeling—guilt, freedom, clarity. It all swirled into a sudden correctness, like the completion of a closed circuit.

“Because,” I finally answered, resuming the rub, “sometimes it’s easier to be rejected for who we aren’t than for who we are.”

Q-Ray’s eyes wiggled away from mine, and he was staring at the shelf of glass penguins. He frowned and said, “Last fall, when you started…I’m sorry we didn’t do more to make you feel included.”

“Water under the bridge,” I said, giving him a little tickle so he knew I meant it. He giggled. “But listen, there’s somewhere else I need to be right now.”

“Where’s that?”

“New Hampshire,” I said. “A friend of mine’s been hitting some hard traveling, and he needs me right now. I should have been there first thing this morning, but I was selfish, and I—”

Q-Ray cut me off  by placing his own hand on my sternum. I took five deep breaths. We took five more together. With his free hand, he fished the keys to his Tesla out of his pocket and dropped them in my lap.

Colton Huelle is a friendly neighborhood fiction guy hailing from scenic Manchester, New Hampshire. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Necessary Fiction, and Cleaver Magazine. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of New Hampshire and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is at work on his first novel.