By Keith J. Powell
B. confesses there’s red on his balance sheet and admits to his night with my wife. We crunch numbers and calculate their single transgression occurred fifty-eight minutes before A. and I officially separated. Why 3,480 seconds should feel like such a significant figure in the calculus of a botched ten-year marriage is a maddening equation. It’s practically a rounding error, but one that undeniably divides half from whole, together from not. It’s a difference I can’t reconcile. And in the end, it’s only this exhaustive accounting, this cruel fraction, that liberates me to finally stop trying to solve for why.
Keith J. Powell writes fiction, CNF, reviews, and plays. He is a founding editor of Your Impossible Voice and occasionally tweets @KeithJ_Powell. He has recent or forthcoming work in Lunch Ticket, Cloves Literary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Bending Genres, and New World Writing.
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