Free Maxine by Claire Wilkshire Page A

a strong fruit. He draws the handles of the bag over her knuckles and his fingers slip over hers. There’s that place in Greece—Spartans.
    Thanks! Maxine hoists the bag, wiggles it in a half-wave, and says, as she’s turning to leave, Cox.
    It’s hovering around zero. A red pickup rushes past Karen and Maxine and with it a solid slice of snowy water like a sheet of plywood—this mass of brown-grey liquid with slushy bits, water fronds waving and dangling everywhere—levitates jerkily up out of the gutter and slaps Karen and Maxine full on and bodily, almost knocking them over. They’re in front of the Pen, almost at the cemetery, on the way home but not close yet. They both cry out with the shock of it, long since soaked but the force and the sheer volume of freezing wetness take them by surprise. Maxine staggers and Karen grabs at her and misses, and they are stumbling and righting themselves and carrying on but there’s no fun in it, and the misery of shoving one waterlogged foot in front of the other again and again with the wind clawing into your face is bearable only because it gets you home faster than stopping and walking, only because there’s some frigging lunatic beside you doing exactly the same thing. They aren’t even talking, that’s how bad—too much effort, no story worth it, gasping through slashes of rain, piss-poor day for a run in this town.
    At three-twenty-five on Monday, Kyle knocks and lets himself in, and these days Maxine is prepared. Barb almost never drops over now, and the mail slot gifts have long since ceased. Maxine understands that for reasons unknown—and she’s not about to inquire—Barb has allowed Kyle to replace her. Yesterday she bought juice and, after a lengthy study of the cookie aisle, animal crackers, and both have been set out on the coffee table. She’s finished her typing for a while and printed off some pages to edit.
    Cool! says Kyle, seeing the bowl. I remember those from when I was a kid.
    Oh. I guess they’re kind of young for you.
    Nah, they’re still pretty good. Thank you. He takes a handful. Can I eat these at the computer?
    Try not to get any crumbs down in the keyboard, OK?
    Especially giant crumbs, right?
    Especially monolithic, damp-around-the-edges crumbs.
    Especially awesome mondo-crumbs like as big as the Trojan Horse and with little guys in them with spears and stuff. Because if the crumbs broke open then the guys would be like running around inside your keyboard and maybe stabbing you in the finger. Kyle is grinning, swivelling gently from side to side.
    Especially those ones.
    OK.
    When people ask Maxine why she left her job, she feels embarrassed. She’d enjoyed being M. Carter, Communications Officer. It sounded important and purposeful. Now she is someone trying to write a novel, which at first had seemed possible and interesting and now strikes her as pretentious and flaky. Someone else is C.O., and it helps to try to remember the amount of time she used to spend reading blindingly dull oil-exploration documents with a view to rearranging their apostrophes and, where possible, tidying up the odd dangling modifier. A delicate business. Maxine was surprised to learn that many people do not want their grammatical errors cleaned up, even when the sentence has been only minimally and tactfully readjusted. For some reason, Could we just put a semi-colon in here? is received as: God, you are a fat pig. They want it the way they wrote it, subject-verb agreement errors and all.
    Now Maxine imagines herself saying: I guess I wasn’t cut out to write a novel. When asked about her Concise History of Astrophysics, Frédérique twirled her vivid orange scarf dramatically and cried: Everything I touch turns to dust! Maxine pictures people nodding in sympathy, saying something encouraging and changing the topic, while thinking What a fool. She’s getting nowhere. Maxine had turned down