Free The Enthusiast by Charlie Haas

showed an equipment yard full of pallets and forklifts. A man in a uniform shirt and ball cap was shooting a woman with a handgun, her blood spraying across the scene. Another man, on hisknees, pleaded with the shooter as people ran away in the background. The detail was finer than anything I’d seen in Cerise’s house or the magazine, but the style was blunt, the people’s heads like swollen knees and their hands like sandbags.
    â€œThat was a workplace shooting last year at Belton Lumber Byproducts,” she said. “I wasn’t there, but I saw the coverage. Most of these things, I was there for.”
    I looked at the other throws lying around. They showed violence, sickness, arrests, and people weeping into pay phones.
    â€œI don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was starting out to do some stuff for the crafts fair in Dundee. In Kentucky. I was going to make a geometric, but the first line across it came out crooked and I said That’s how the ground looks out here. The horizon. That’s how it started. I had a big bag of frozen drumettes in the house and I just kept going.”
    She bent over a pile of throws on the floor and flipped through them. “This is the kids from Washington Park kicking my nephew Danny’s head on the curb. He had eighteen stitches. This is us waiting in the emergency room. This woman had a chest wound. This one is Danny after his bad reaction to the medication. This is a fistfight at my niece’s First Communion. This is a dishonest lawyer.”
    She stood up. “I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s not like I can take these to the crafts fair. I’m sorry I got you all the way out here.”
    â€œNo,” I said. “I think Cerise will like these.”
    She looked at me like I was crazy. “Cerise will shit,” she said.
    I photographed them anyway. When I finished I said, “Can I get you anything? Some food? Do you want to go into town?”
    â€œNo thanks,” she said. She’d picked up the workplace-shooting throw again. “I think I need to finish.”
    Â 
    I walked out of her house and straight into one of those unearned euphorias Jillian and I had talked about. For some reason Belton looked beautiful now, with its doublewides and shot-up STOP signs, and a ripped page of arithmetic homework on Big Chief paper lying in a patch of dirty snow. I saw the ratty horizon from the crochets laid over the real one. When I spotted a pay phone I called Barney and said, “It’s Henry.”
    He said, “Hi,” but not “How are you?” a habit of his that usually started the first of several silences.
    â€œI think I might be leaving my job,” I said. I hadn’t known it till I said it to him, but Dobey had me troubleshooting unicorns, Jillian thought our kiss was a freak accident, and that shaky yarn horizon was making the world look wider.
    There was a pause. “Okay,” Barney said. “I’m sorry it’s not going well.”
    â€œI didn’t say it’s not going well. It’s just going how it’s going. There’s a woman I don’t think I’m getting anywhere with, either.”
    â€œAre you going back to college?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “Look, I know you’re mad at me. I’m sorry about that. I just want to tell you what I’m doing.”
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œI’m in front of a grocery store in Belton, Ohio. The sky is bright orange. It’s pretty, but I don’t think it’s healthy. I think it’s from a company called Belton Lumber Byproducts. What are you doing?”
    â€œI was reading about nuclear division in strange cytoplasm.”
    â€œOkay.” It was getting colder. “Do you remember when we went to the zoo in L.A.?”
    â€œI remember we went there, yes,” Barney said.
    â€œDo you remember telling me what the