Kevin Wilson is the author of the story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009).  His fiction has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, and elsewhere.

How I Stood in the Wrong Place and Lingered There Too Long (December 20, 2009. Issue 12.)

I was showing the trainee how to scan the pages into the computer when Dana came into my little box of an office and tossed some Form 19’s onto my desk. “You didn’t do ‘em right,” she said. She was making me look bad in front of the trainee but I should have been nicer. “Well, Jesus, I did ‘em the way I’ve always done ‘em,” I said. She rolled her eyes, like, “Do we have to do this right now? Can we not be civil?” and said, “You’ve always done ‘em wrong and then I fixed ‘em for you, but I’m not going to do that anymore.” This is important; I’d had a thing with her for about two months after a year of flirting back and forth, but that was over now.

She walked out of the office and the trainee said, “Wow, that is a mannish woman.” And, yeah, Dana was mannish, her body flat and muscular, her jaw square and her hair short, but I didn’t like him saying it. I scanned a few more sheets into the computer and then I told him to come with me to the loading dock.

Outside, no one around, he wouldn’t stop talking about it. “Do you think she’s a dyke?” he asked. I was looking for something specific on the ground but I turned around and stared him down. “How the fuck should I know?” I said, and returned to my search. Finally, I found it, a broken-off handle from a rake that had mysteriously appeared out there one morning and had never been disposed of. “Okay,” I said, gripping the handle like a baseball bat, “this is just something we do with the new guy. Same thing happened to me when I got here.” I hit him on his left cheekbone and felt something give and he went down in a heap. I jumped off the loading dock and walked to my car and drove around town. It had been stupid to think that I could stay at that job without eventually going crazy, Dana so close to me that I could feel her disappointment. I wished I’d never fucked her because then I could honestly say that the only people I’d fucked had been people that I’d loved.

I drove to a fast food joint and ate two hamburgers so quickly that I couldn’t even remember having eaten them when I pulled out of the parking lot. I thought about how Dana had shown me, talking softly the entire time, how to go down on her, and how I’d said to myself, as it was happening, “This is going to change things. I’m going to be a better person when this is over.” It started to rain but I didn’t turn on my windshield wipers, and I thought about how every time I figured I was going to be a better person at the end of something, it never came true.