BEFORE THEY KILL HIM, HE WANTS SOME CHICKEN. The entire conversation, thirty-minutes of hell with her mother, boils down to this.
Charlotte is on the treadmill when the first call comes in; she ignores it. She is a quarter of the way to 20k and this run, about two hours of her day, is the centerpiece of her existence. Her free time has blossomed in the past year since postponing graduate school. This decision, ostensibly made to pursue her passion for music (the great love of her life) has yielded no creative output. She has not written a song, nor performed (publicly or privately) for three months. She is still certain that music is the great love of her life: she simply finds it harder to locate this certainty amongst the violent, visceral hatred she feels towards it. She despises popular music for its banality and soullessness. She despises classic, undeniable music for existing in a world that no longer does. She even despises the exceptions, the rare successes who do exactly what it is she wants to do and succeed – produce quality music in this vapid environment – because their existence points a mocking finger at her failure. She despises it all and so she runs. She looks sickly. Her friends have expressed concern about her appearance; her thin, ropey and oddly muscled frame resembles an actress playing someone afflicted with a horrible disease. She knows this, is worried herself, but does not stop running. She cannot stop because
…
Michael is a writer from Toronto. His fiction has appeared in The Baffler, BULL and Does It Have Pockets.