Free All of Us and Everything by Bridget Asher

tell me where exactly and I’ll come over there and kick your ass in.”
    Her second message was about Ru’s editor. “I can’t tell Hanby that you’ve fled the country. The veins in her head will explode. You know she’s afraid to call you about your effing engagement announcement.” Ru hadn’t told anyone she’d called it off. “The poor kid has made a demigod out of you because she thinks her career depends on this next book. Jesus H. Christ, I hope you’re working on it.”
    Her third message was a little drunk, and played out like the lyrics of a country song. “You got to do what you got to do even if your heart’s sore.” Why Maska thought Ru was heartsore, Ru didn’t know. She should have assumed Ru was in love. She decided it was projection. Heartsore was after all the human condition, and why country music endured, against all odds.
    In her final message, Maska confessed to wrangling Ru’s arrival dates out of Cliff and she said she’d given “brittle little Hanby Popper the go-ahead to set up a bookstore event in Ocean City. It’ll be the blogger set, for the most part. Tumblr, tweeterers, all that shite. She thinks that engaging your fans might light a fire under your tushy.”
    The idea of a bookstore event made Ru feel as brittle as Hanby Popper, who was brittle indeed. Ru hated the questions, especially anything to do with inspiration, a term she found both weirdly religious and also deeply destructive to American culture. Inspiration can’t be sustained. “You can be inspired to write a first paragraph, but not a whole book. That requires work,” she told interviewers. “That’s why there’s a career called novelist but not first-paragraphist. As a culture, can we please stop asking that stupid question?”
    It was largely believed that an author’s interaction with fans increased the fan base. In Ru’s case, she was sure that each time she met with fans, she lost more than she gained.
    Ru erased the messages one by one and didn’t call anyone back.
    Wearing the traditional ankle-length skirt with a tank top and a shawl, she boarded the plane, and although it was a long calm flight—with an empty seat next to her, which she accepted as a gift from the universe—she had trouble sleeping.
    The second flight out of Chicago was packed. She was wedged between an ancient lady reading a bodice ripper that didn’t keep her awake and a large salesman from Kansas. They sat on the tarmac for so long that the delay allowed one very late traveler to rush down the aisle—untucked blue shirt, jeans, breathless from jogging to the gate, no doubt. He was tall with bulky shoulders and while taking his place, just one row up from Ru, he was apologetic. He said to his seat mate, “If this flight weren’t delayed, I’d have never made it. Sorry to take up the spare room. Really. I’m so sorry.” And then he turned and gave a general apology to the people around him.
    Ru assumed he was Catholic, what with his need for generalized atonement, and that maybe he’d played lacrosse but surely not football. She mostly saw him from behind. His hair was a little long and when he sat down it swung forward slightly and he pushed it back in a way that she felt was egotistical or overly stylized or precious, maybe even a little British.
    She turned away from him, and shortly after takeoff she fell asleep.
    A little while later, Ru woke up, and was disoriented by all the Caucasians in their jeans and haircuts, sipping their complimentary drinks in plastic cups. They were all slightly blurry; she hadn’t worn her glasses since she left the States. Slightly blurry wasn’t a bad way to experience life, she’d decided. She said, aloud, “We believe what we’re told.”
    She was startled when she realized that the overweight businessman from Kansas had been replaced by the possibly Catholic former lacrosse player. He was grinning like he knew something she didn’t. “Hi.”
    Ru rubbed her eyes,