The Turning Point

Every Day Fiction/March 2022

In that dreary mid-March, mid-semester time, Larry found it hard to get up. Long after his wife, Cheryl, left the house for her student sewing circle and after his own alarm sounded, he lay awake. He listened to a dragging sound, something heavy and dull, scratching against outside pavement. Perhaps it was a dead body in a garbage can, he speculated, hauling his own load from a rumpled bed. While doing so, he accidentally kicked a plastic water bottle, of which there were many spread around the room, under the dresser…