The Sound of Glass Breaking

This is a mainstream story I wrote while my wife and I were living in Salt Lake City, Utah. We were only in Salt Lake for a year while Kathy did her doctoral internship at the University of Utah Counseling Center and worked on her dissertation. I got a job at the university training people how to use their telephones and voicemail ("Press pound. That's right, pound.") At night I tried to get some writing done.

I thought external deadlines would spur me to productivity, so I took advantage of my staff discount and enrolled in a fiction writing course with François Camoin. The first assignment eventually turned into "Free, and Clear." The second was this story. (The third and final story was a mess best lost to history called "Golf Digest Fiction Supplement #8: Love on the Links"—an aburdist thing about golf-cart-jousting octogenarians who fight and fall in love.)

That year we lived in a dark and dreary basement apartment. The landlord called it "garden level." I called it "soul-killing." But we were broke and the price was right. Salt Lake was a great place to live, even if you weren't Mormon, but in that apartment I felt like we were underground and under siege. Almost everything else in the story is made up, but my God, that apartment…