Free Morning Is Dead by Andersen Prunty

fell forward until he was on all fours. Blood poured from his head and onto the gleaming cement floor. Alvin reached down and put his hand in his pocket, feeling the keys and yanking them out.
    “I saved your life,” Archer said. “And this is the payment.”
    “You’re fucking insane.”
    “I’ll find you.” Alvin walked quickly to the door. “I have nothing better to do. You know that, don’t you? I’m going to find you and feed you to the rades piece by fucking piece.”
    With shaky hands, Alvin undid the lock. He threw the bar back into the Shucking Room. It landed on Archer’s back and bounced off, clanging loudly on the floor. He thought about throwing the keys too, but decided to pocket them. Archer had declared war and Alvin didn’t want to give him any advantages. From the outside, he pulled the door closed and noticed there was the same type of padlock there too. He snapped it shut and continued down the dark alleyway.

A Hospital at Night
    Part Eight
     
    April coughed out cigarette smoke and coughed out the night and walked back into the too bright lobby of the hushed hospital and into the elevator that felt like a tomb and back up to Alvin’s floor. The outside chill still clung to her and she kept Mirabel’s sweater pulled tight around her shoulders. She harbored a secret desire to walk into Alvin’s room and find nurses and Doctor Banks gathered around him, trying to revive him. Instead she found Mirabel seated in one of the two chairs beside the bed.
    “How is he?” April asked.
    “Same.”
    April sat down in the chair next to her.
    “Thanks for the cigarette. I borrowed your sweater.”
    “Don’t worry about it. Are you planning on going back home?”
    April chuffed out a laugh.
    “A hotel, maybe? You could probably even take a little nap here. You have to be tired.”
    “I couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t want to wake up.”
    Mirabel nodded. “I’m here to listen, if you want me to be.”
    “You know, I don’t think I really hated him until I found out he was cheating on me.”
    “Are you sure about that?”
    “A wife knows. Wouldn’t you know it if your husband was cheating on you?”
    “Definitely. I could tell just by looking at him.”
    “Well, he had become someone else so I wouldn’t have been able to tell just by looking at him. But he would come home after one of his mysterious absences and I could smell her on him.”
    “Did you ever confront him about it?”
    “I couldn’t. Saying it out loud would have just made it more real, if that makes any sense. But I wouldn’t sleep with him after I knew, not that he really wanted it anyway. Guess he didn’t need it. I don’t think it makes me a better person or anything, but I would never have slept with Morning if I didn’t know Al was cheating on me. And the worst part of him doing something like that was how it made me look to other people. Apparently, he didn’t really try to keep it a secret. I ran into a neighbor at the store and she looked at me like she didn’t know me and I asked her what was wrong and she said she thought I had changed the color of my hair. And then she started to explain and then she stopped and there was this moment of realization. We both knew. She had seen Alvin out with someone else and assumed it was me. She didn’t have to say anything else.”
    “I’m sure it hurts.”
    “It’s one of the worst feelings in the world. And it’s amazing how I could manage to explain away everything else—maybe he lost his job because he was depressed and wasn’t able to make it in on time or fulfill his duties while he was there, maybe he started using drugs to cope with the depression, maybe he really was just bored and needed a change—but I couldn’t find any way to justify him fucking someone else. I gave him everything. And what he wanted was something new.”
    She started crying again. These were painful things she was saying but they needed to be said. She cried and listened to the