Short Story / Short story/novel excerpt: "Fearful and Wonderful." (Analysis)
Fearful and Wonderful
By Matthew Furman
David was pretty sure she wouldn’t sleep with him, but like the others, he moved forward anyway, caught up with the slight crook of her almost-smile, the possibility of silence, and the knowledge that sometimes these things go the other way.
The scent of Sakura’s Irish coffee was in the air, but no cigarettes. The Java Hut banned them two years ago.
He didn’t need anything; he’d slammed two large glasses of red wine with the lasagna Susan made that night.
”I’m flattered, but…no,” she said, looking into her drink.
Sakura’s boot-encased foot jiggled even more and for the 10th time David wondered if her small feet were tipped with polish. Her internship with the newspaper ended in May. There was still a chance he’d see some lighter-weight footwear.
At first he thought this settled it, but she went on.
“You have a wife. And a son. And I’m not over someone yet.”
David knew exactly who she meant. An e-mail between two copy desk gossips had accidentally bounced to him. The guy was her age, still in college, and worked for the newspaper in sports.
He was a chubby, good-natured drunk who wrote well. David found himself reading his sports stories until the end even if they made no sense to him.
He gave her a voice that was used to telling people what to do.
“Don’t bring them up. She’s not who she used to be. Neither am I.”
“Okay,” was all he got.
Sakura had got to the coffee shop before him. Their table sat in a picture window facing the street.
David didn’t notice anyone looking conspicuously casual when he arrived, but as skittish as she was, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d salted the place with a few of her friends. He didn’t even think he would have held it against her.
His request to meet her after work was made with a cracked voice, and the booze hadn’t changed it.
His words still went weird when he’d finally quit beating around the bush and went with: “Ever since you started, my head has been completely elsewhere. You are ridiculously beautiful.”
He got a tad from that. A shimmer, but then cold, easy truth.
After he got more decaf, Sakura for some reason felt he needed to know her criteria for men.
“I have to get to know what someone’s really like,” she said. “I like to observe people.”
This last was almost certainly the reason David was sitting across from her, an innocent gaze taken out of context and noodled into something it wasn’t.
Now that he knew what he needed to know, his mind went, as it always did, to self-preservation. Checklists ticked off, damage assessments were taken.
His e-mails, while a little more personal than most work notes, were completely clean. Ditto office conversations.
The cops reporter, a gossip in his own right, had passed David and Sakura in the hall when he had arranged the meeting, but David was pretty sure he’d heard no details. He was always meeting with co-workers, anyway.
He tried to appeal to that part of her that smiled when they talked about film.
“If you dropped a dime on me I’d be ruined.”
“I know. But…I’m not that mean.”
“I hope so,” all dignity out the window, thoughts of sitting on the computer all day in his underwear listening to the Rush Limbaugh show, looking for jobs.
“I want you to know, I will not act weird in the slightest over this,” he said. “I won’t treat you different at all. As far as I’m concerned this never happened.”
“It isn’t entirely new to me,” said Sakura. “Someone in the anime society at school asked me out, and we had to put it behind us. And it’s cool.”
Well, there you go then.
“I have to go. I have homework.”
A flash of shame and remember she is in the journalism department. This is going to get back to people you run with.
“You’re uh, not wearing a wire are you?”
“No. And you can’t check.”
Out the door and on the way to their cars, hers parked directly in front of him. Her cell phone rang the moment she reached her car and David didn’t like this for some reason.
He drove home still buzzed. If a magical computer checklist would have fallen from the sky with a “suicide” option, he would have went for it. When he fell asleep that night his hand was still curled into the gun handle Susan wouldn’t let him buy.
*
The night before they were to leave for Pittsburgh and Susan’s class reunion David actually answered his cell phone.
Darby. Wanting to drink watermelon beer and eat cheese fries with him at The Clink in celebration of his upcoming CD release. Okay, they were to celebrate the pitch meeting for a potential CD release.
Some Fruit Loop in Seattle had heard Darby’s demo tape and thought they might be able to tap some sort of weird vein in the avalanche of interest brought about by the Johnny Cash movie that came out a few years ago.
And Darby was buying.
”I didn’t get past the operators at ‘America’s Got Talent,’ but this guy thinks I really got a shot with this,” said Darby, already a little lit. “That just goes to show you how…subjective…this whole game is. And that’s all it is. A game. With lights and girls with large breasts and a night that doesn’t end.”
David listened politely but didn’t have much to say. It was like critiquing a high school art class when three-fourths of the entrants were coal sketches of chicks’ hands.
But he ended up drinking much, much more than he had anticipated. He stumbled into his bed at 3 a.m., just ½ hour before Susan’s alarm clock was set to wake them up and get them on their way to Pittsburgh and legions of young-but-doughy cell phone salesmen and female pharmaceutical reps who married for love.
He lay awake, still drunk, until the clock radio went off to “Mancow’s Morning Madhouse.” Susan loved it.
He hadn’t exactly spreadsheeted it, but he was fairly certain he almost always went out the night before they went on a vacation or extended trip.
Why do I do this?
They never talked in these early morning evacuations, like a Cold War family getting out of Dodge before the Russkies parachute in with progressive agricultural programs.
David and Wogan dozed until they pulled into a McDonald’s in Johnstown. The stories about the big flood there had always stuck with David. He always remembered the one where the father saw two legs sticking out of the water and thought only one of his daughters had lived, but when he grabbed them he saw he had a leg from each girl.
Oh well, time for McGriddles.
He ate a McGriddle and an Egg McMuffin Valu Meal, and didn’t feel guilty in the slightest. He imagined the molten coffee flowing down his gullet like those diet infomercials where the guy throws a bunch of food into a punchbowl to show you what you supposedly eat in a day.
His headache slowly subsided.
David slept again and woke up in Monroeville, near the mall where they shot the original “Dawn of the Dead.” During the film’s 25th anniversary, most of the original cast and crew had returned to the mall for tours, panel discussions and general debauchery.
David and a friend had got drunk with “Flyboy” and “Roger,” although the two actors seemed annoyed when the two fans continually called them by their film names.
Rumors abounded to the contrary, but alas, George A. Romero was a no-show.
Pittsburgh’s a funny town.
To paraphrase a newsreader, it’s “Financially ailing, infastructrually decaying, and overwhelmingly white.”
This last was certainly true. You could walk into a K-Mart in Pittsburgh and swear you were magically transported to a K-Mart in Ainsworth. Same old sad, stopped-over white people. Same NASCAR caps. Same bad teeth. Same devotion to a certain football team that bordered on religious, homoerotic, or both.
Even the liberals in Pittsburgh didn’t seem to like black people very much. Susan had a rabidly Democratic, pro-union aunt who still used the words “colored people.” And sometimes worse words.
But some of the town was pretty great. Everyone there seemed to love fireworks for some reason, and looked for every excuse to set them off.
Weddings and funerals were always topped by wakes so boozy and full of feeling you thought you were in a movie. Especially if they were held at the fire hall.
Many of the little neighborhoods had their own little street festivals during the summer.
One year, before The Wogan Era, David and Susan had gone to Millvale Days with a handful of her high school friends. All week the streets were shut down for rides, carnival food, face painting, the works. They’d gone bar crawling, and in one rat hole dive Susan had dropped a quarter in the jukebox and played “Tainted Love,” vamping it up and singing along. She gave a dirty look just for him at the part where it goes “…I can’t stand the way you tease,” and David had broken the party up to get home and have some of the best marriage sex of all time.
If he was honest with himself, nearly all of their best sex had occurred in Susan’s hometown. This was not a line of thought he wanted to pursue.
Like every man visiting his girlfriend’s parents early on in the relationship, David had gone well out of his way to be a good guest. Taking the trash out, washing the dishes, helping with the groceries, changing the cat box, you name it.
Slowly, he realized that Susan’s sweet and infirm parents clearly expected him to be like Susan’s sister’s husband and do absolutely nothing. The only time his future mother-in-law had expressed even remote disgust at him was one July 4th when his repeated beer runs to the child-killer fridge in the basement had resulted in him leaving the door open and spoiling the much-anticipated potato salad. Icy silence from a few relatives.
Slowly he started to morph back into his old self, content with dropping his plate into the sink and heading back upstairs to Susan’s old attic bedroom to read and drink the day away.
Only with Wogan’s care did he go all out, changing him, feeding him, and playing with him, not only because he wanted to, but it was a way to “Be social,” as Susan was constantly chiding him to do.
Sometimes he caught Susan’s mother staring at him at these times, and as sweet as the old lady was, David in his normal paranoia thought she thought he was trying to establish himself as a domestic in the event another job didn’t work out.
Well, there is that, isn’t there?
* *
Susan turned down the volume on his XTC CD and crawled on top of David as he rested in the too-fluffy upstairs bed.
She had this thing where she pretended to be a cat and nudged him with her nose, demanding his attention. When they’d laid beside each other in college, she’d pretended to purr. Very Sophia Loren.
”Pay attention to meeeee.”
”How could I not?”
”I changed my mind. I kinda wish I wasn’t going to this.”
The fact that she referred to only herself in the situation bothered him for some reason.
”Well, it’s a little too late for that now, isn’t it?” replied David in his stuffy Oxford voice.
”Yeah.”
”So why say anything?”
”I don’t know. I didn’t realize how much it was going to cost. You know me. I always expect a lot and I’m almost always disappointed.”
”You’re on your home turf. I think you can skip the subtext.”
”Huh?”
”I’m not happy with the way things are. Anything. We have a lot to talk about.”
Not that he wanted to, but with those words David guaranteed that nothing more of substance would be discussed that night.
”I hate it when you do that,” she said. “You always preface every heavy discussion you want to have. You come off like a middle manager who’s become ‘very disappointed’ with the busboy who used to be ‘The best employee you had.’”
”Well, I used to be a middle manager.”
”Yep. And I didn’t agonize over the bills every week.”
”Time and place. And this ain’t it.”
Susan laughed. Sometimes it was hard to tell if she was serious or playful. Maybe she just switched seamlessly.
”I love it when you talk low-rent.”
”Please help me pick a tie. Preferably something sleazy.”
* * *
David and Susan left a dozing Wogan with a nervous-looking Grandma. She’d never been able to get him to sleep during any one of their nights on the town.
Up and down ridiculously slanted hills and over the bridge where Ben Roethlisberger nearly splattered his brains to pick up one of Susan’s high school girlfriends. Daphne was their age but had got pregnant at 13 and was now mother to a driving-age son, Art.
David, in a blast of “Should we really laugh at this?” humor, would loudly tell a group of Susan’s classmates that Art was undoubtedly popular at school because he “Had the hot mom!”
The place was supposed to be Irish, but the name “Throwers” made David think of Greek Olympic events. It was situated on a corner of The Strip between a used car dealership and a notary public.
”Uhh, what is that tent set up back there for?” said Susan.
An enormous Renaissance Faire-type tent was capped on to the back of the joint, fitted right over what a chalkboard sign proclaimed “The Official Deck of Summer.”
”Oh, I’m sure it’s for the band,” said David, pointing to another sign announcing the fresh-from-Baltimore arrival of “Slutburger,” the “Donnas of the Dirty South!”
The three walked into the pub’s entrance feeling like Dorothy and her friends meeting Oz.
As it turned out, Slutburger was bleating out their set in the pub’s main room, mangling a Babes in Toyland cover to a packed and very inebriated room.
They had to actually walk through the band’s set to get to the service exit that led to The Official Deck of Summer. Daphne almost had an eyeball dislodged by the cosmetically jagged edge of a bass guitar.
Two extremely good-looking young men sat behind a folding table covered with crepe paper, looking for all the world like hosts of a fraternity party.
And so it began.
Ten years down the toilet, children born and lost, an ocean of alcohol and coffee chugged down, classmates killed by freak cancer, car accidents and war, jobs won and lost, sexual identities switched and some abandoned altogether, and the time warp of high school reunions blew a raspberry at it all.
Call it “The Lord of the Punch Bowl,” and there never was a conch shell.
The hyper good-lookings presented the trio with nametag stickers embossed with their senior yearbook photo in case anyone had been disfigured by fire.
David was working hard not to go down this mental path, but he had heard that a lot of hooking up occurred at these affairs. He wasn’t paying attention, but he did notice the only woman to give him a once-over looked like that girl you knew with an eating disorder who sat in the back of the classroom and furtively wrote in a notebook all period.
For all the money they paid, the food turned out to be veggie platters and hot entrees like spinach tortellini.
Susan was taking pictures with her digital camera.
”I am so throwing this up on the blog,” she muttered. “They’ve got a beer pong tournament.”
But amazingly enough, it wasn’t Susan who ended up feeling glum about the thing. For the first time in a long time in their relationship, she grinned, beared it, had a drink and just went with it.
This made David feel good, the best he’d felt in a long time. Like watching her get over her disappointment was something he could pin his next move on, his move out of whatever they were in.
But he still felt like drinking.
* * *
Cocktails $5, bottled domestics $3 to $4. So much for an event discount.
Buying the ingredients and making himself a boilermaker, David sat next to Susan and made up stories about the other attendees.
First up was the unfortunately rat-like young man on the arm of the woman who looked like she spent a lot of time at compact car shows.
”That one, that one has a plan,” said David to Susan, mouth close to her ear to drown out The Simple Minds.
”Mmmm, what’s that?”
”Guy’s been lonely his whole life, but he’s got money, and that goes a long way. Computer programmer. Many, many dates but he looks Polish so he probably wants the big deal at the chapel.”
”Big deal?”
”Marriage, kids, the Full Monty.”
And there was an explosive Susan squeal of laughter.
David was aware that he’d be mildly ill if he saw this behavior in another couple, but he didn’t care.
”So tonight’s the culmination. No more games. He calls up Pittsburgh’s best escort service, what is it, Whores at Your Door? And he thinks, ‘I am going to ask this girl to marry me at the end of the night.’”
”Whaaat?”
”Yep. He thinks, ‘This girl is lonely, scarred and obviously hating how she lives her life. She may have a pedicure 24-7 and a thong closet but deep down she is empty. She will accept my proposal on the spot. And I can cart her back to the 15th-year reunion and the ruse will be complete.’”
”But she doesn’t accept, does she?”
”Nope. And his mind is blown. His concept of commerce, security and companionship is blown completely sideways. She tries to leave his hotel room, and an awkward tug-o-war ensues. Whores at Your Door sends their muscle and he’s beaten to a pulp. And robbed.”
”Touching,” said Susan. “Next?”
He pan-and-scanned the breeze-whipped tent.
”Those two, they’ve got serious commitment issues. Well, it makes sense. They’re married to other people.”
A neatly dressed and meticulously groomed couple who screamed “Lions Club.” At least the guy did. It wasn’t hard to a see a layer of 90s flannel under the woman’s current onion skin of composure.
”And they came together to their high school reunion?”
”Yeah, but see, this is what they do. They were in love in high school, but never got together because of caste system issues. They married elsewhere, but every year they get together for one night out of the evening and feel out all those spots they can’t forget.”
”That’s so sweet and sad,” said Susan.
”That’s the biggest bunch of crap I’ve heard all night,” said Daphne, and belched lady-like.
They ignored her.
”How come all your stories are mean and sad?” said Susan.
”I’m trying.”
* * *
Boilermakers, bumming cigarettes from the crowd at Slutburger, and keeping the conversion light even when the bass player was obviously into him.
He sat down and closed his eyes and took in the ambient noise.
* * *
”She keeps calling me, and that’s great, but I just lost all respect for her ever since she quit her job. And she has no intention of looking for a new one. She’s perfectly content to let mommy and daddy pay for everything.”
”Their first album’s their most poppy, but their latest is definitely their most experimental.”
”We don’t watch a lot of movies these days. We did see ‘Juno,’ though. It was different.”
”Text me if you want me to play a song for y’all!”
”My brother was there. He was an aide for the guy. He said it was like nothing you’ve ever seen in your life. There was this weird energy in the room, like when David Copperfield gets ready to do something. And he just went, all over the floor. Kyle still has nightmares about the poor lady whose jaw got broke.”
”I hate this town. Why did we come here?”
”At least your class song was cool. Ours was from ‘Titanic.’”
”Flip-flops with her Easter dress.”
”They’re remaking way too many movies. If they’re going to remake something, why not ‘Triffids?’ That’s a movie that’s begging to be remade. Can you imagine what they could do with the CGI?”
“How’s our beer situation?”
”I learned it by watching you!”
”What?”
* * *
When he opened his eyes, it was going on 1 a.m. Susan and Daphne were dancing together on the crowded dance floor.
Susan blew him a kiss and gave him a lecherous wink.
He marched over, grabbed her rough like he knew she liked, and sputtered, “Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
God love Daphne, but they were more than happy to see her out the car door. They mouths clenched on each other as Daphne went in to pay the babysitter, and again at every Stop sign and traffic light.
Someone was smiling on them when they got home – Grandma had actually managed to get Wogan asleep around midnight. They took a last glance at him in his Pack-and-Play, teeth probably brushed but chocolate smeared across his cheeks. Arms spread, he looked like he was falling and loving every second of it.
* * *
For the first time in recent memory, David didn’t let Susan take the reins of sex. It had been hard for him to accept early on in the marriage that she had a stronger libido than him, but it gradually grew easier to let this guide the fun, an ebbing away of will similar to his domestic stoppage at the in-laws.
This early morning felt different.
Susan had always had a streak of submission-as-sexual-empowerment-and-enhancement, and he played on that now, slamming the door to her old bedroom and pushing her cheek-first against it, like the bad guys were just around the hall. And there wasn’t a moment to spare.
Susan closed her eyes and went wherever she did during these moments. David knew exactly where he was as his hands fluttered over her front and back and he kissed her neck and blew in her ear.
He threw her on the bed as if tanks were grinding in the streets, slick with the blood of dissenters. They only had this brief encounter before they had to move on in the interests of La Causa.
David heard good and pure skulls crushed by rifle butts just outside the window as he kissed Susan all over. It was to be quick, not to get it over with and sleep but because the world was getting tore open like a soda can.
”Do you know?” he asked between kisses. “Do you know I love you? Do you feel it?”
”Yes,” she panted.
”The first time I saw you I knew you were it,” he said. “Without question. I moved in…to make you mine.”
”You shouldn’t have bothered,” she said, kissing his bare chest. “I was yours long before you knew it.
”But it was nice of you.”
Susan eventually got to where she always wound up, on top. Half of their good clothes were still on, but David, for all his excitement, had managed to rip off his dress socks.
Mortar shells fell like failed NASA launches and he heard a scream. It might have been a 14 year-old banner waver. It might have been himself. With every move he felt himself becoming another person. Or at least trying to.
Things didn’t sound good for the freedom fighters. The machine gun fire from the tanks had stopped, but he knew two blocks up a firing squad was being prepared.
”I love you,” he whispered, and they locked eyes.
The whistle blew and the rifles cracked as one. Everything ended and something started, right there in the dark. In an attic bedroom on a quiet street in Pittsburgh.
She rolled off and David reached for a loose cigarette he’d stashed in his dress shirt pocket. Before he could light it, Susan gently took it from his hands and dropped it into the Snoopy trashcan.
”I want to go back,” said David, still panting with no shame. “To that state of mind. Can we?”
Susan was already up, carrying back to the refrigerator the two unopened Rolling Rocks David had brought up.
She flashed a slow smile and closed the door.
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A really enjoyable, engaging read overall. I think the philandering David is a little hard to reconcile with the passionate David with the lower libido at the end. Plot and structure feels like it needs a little more work, but overall very enjoyable, and some really interesting, well-written parts.
In the first line, “but like the others” – did you mean that there were others moving towards the woman, or that David had moved forward towards others before? If you meant the latter, I think it should be “as he did with the others”. If you meant the former, it’s not clear who the others are. I also like the detail of this sentence, the almost-smile, possibility of silence, really interesting, but then the end of the sentence seems too vague. I think its “these things”- I think you mean flirtations, but I’m not sure. I would change either “these things” and make it specific or “the other way”, and make it “in his favor” or something a little clearer.
I like that the first bit of dialog is an answer to a question you haven’t spelled out in dialog. I also think “looking into her drink” is perfect, believable.
There is formatting/paragraph confusion but probably someone told you that already.
Sakura’s boot-encased foot jiggled even more, (add comma) and for the 10th time David wondered if her small feet were tipped with polish.
I would change boot-encased foot to boot. Otherwise great line, giving us a lot of information.
Formatting is confused when it goes to “He was a chubby, good-natured drunk..” at first I thought you meant David. Then when you say “He gave her a voice..” I would use his name to clarify, and also maybe simplify…“David used his authoritative voice.” Or “David used the commanding voice reserved for underlings.”
I wonder if it should be “Sakura had gotten to the coffee shop…”
“He didn’t even think he would have held it against her.” I would change to “He wouldn’t have held it against her.” Just to make it clearer.
The interaction between the two of them in the coffee shop is good but the paragraph situation makes it confusing.
“A flash of shame and remember she is in the journalism department.” The tense of “remember” doesn’t seem right, there is no subject in this sentence which makes it feel like second person, like he is telling himself to remember, which is a shift from everything else and doesn’t work here.
“Hers parked directly in front of his” (change him to his).
I think it should read “he would have “gone” for it, (rather than went for it).
I like how you end the section, but I don’t know about “magical computer checklist”, why it needs to be computer? I think the last line is great.
“….Pittsburgh and Susan’s class reunion, (add comma) David “ maybe I would use “for” Susan’s class reunion.
“Okay, they were to celebrate the pitch meeting for a potential CD release.”
The “okay” here sounds kind of conversational with the reader, which doesn’t quite fit the tone so far. How about…”…at the Clink in celebration of his upcoming CD release, or at least the pitch meeting to get it released.”
I would use “high school art competition” if you are going to use “entrants” and “charcoal” rather than “coal.” I also think girl would work better than chicks’, just makes David a little less macho and sympathetic.
The sentence “He stumbled into his bed at 3 AM..” is a crazy run on, but I like it. Maybe it could use some punctuation. “on their way to Pittsburgh, to mingle with legions of young….” Ending it with “married for love” is excellent in this guy’s circumstance!
I would put, “he thought”, after “why do I do this?”
Should it be “he thought only one of his daughters had died’? This flood story is good and interesting. Oh well, time for McGriddles moves the reader back into the guy’s head, which is tricky again POV-wise.
I like all the metaphors in this section, it works well with a hungover character, Russia, infomercials, etc.
I would make all the “Dawn of the Dead” stuff one paragraph.
I think you can also lump together all the Pittsburgh stuff. I think that’s all really great, interesting writing. I love the fireworks stuff.
Maybe add a dash to “rat-hole dive”
The fact that she referred to only herself in the situation bothered him for some reason. – great line! Very telling. The whole bedtime conversation feels totally real.
“Up and down ridiculously slanted hills and over the bridge where Ben Roethlisberger nearly splattered his brains to pick up one of Susan’s high school girlfriends.” This sentence needs a subject, but its good otherwise.
“The three walked into the pub’s entrance feeling like Dorothy and her friends meeting Oz.” I missed who the third person is, I thought Daphne was the girlfriend of Ben who died, I didn’t get that she joined the group.
The introduction to this whole setting is a little confusing to me. Is this the reunion, or a bar on their way to the reunion?
Also, I think overall there are too many band/music references. I know most of this music but I don’t think the details add too much and it will alienate a section of your readers.
Daphne almost had an eyeball dislodged by the cosmetically jagged edge of a bass guitar. Good line!
The hyper good-lookings presented the trio with nametag stickers embossed with their senior yearbook photo in case anyone had been disfigured by fire. Another great line, really cynical and funny.
”Guy’s been lonely his whole life, but he’s got money, and that goes a long way. Computer programmer. Many, many dates but he looks Polish so he probably wants the big deal at the chapel.” This is great characterization.
A neatly dressed and meticulously groomed couple who screamed “Lions Club.” This sentence also needs a subject but is also good.
I like the ambient noise section but I think its too long, a little hard to get through.
“stronger libido than he did” (rather than him).
He threw her on the bed as if tanks were grinding in the streets, slick with the blood of dissenters. They only had this brief encounter before they had to move on in the interests of La Causa. This is excellent, really funny and telling.
“world was getting torn open” (not tore open).
I really enjoyed this piece. You have a great way with images, metaphors, experimental and fun. I was engaged the whole time. The main issues are the paragraph structure and a couple of pov problems, a little grammar, etc.
As far as the plot is concerned, I don’t get what exactly is the turning point in their relationship. The closest thing is that moment where Susan is not disappointed, which is good but doesn’t feel powerful enough to really reconnect them. I like how it ends up, but it feels a little random to me, and in real life, it’s hard to believe this “going back” will last.
I love the Pittsburgh stuff, the relationship trouble stuff, the in-laws stuff, all really original, interesting and well-written. Thanks for a good read.
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I like the narrative style, especially analogies like David’s hand curling around the gun Susan won’t let him buy. The telling details and cynical sense of humour really kept me reading.
My only issue is why David made a pass at Sakura in the first place: that part doesn’t feel part of the complete picture for me. I don’t see why David is unsatisfied enough in his marriage to do that and it doesn’t really seem to come full circle in any way, although I’m guessing that’s because Fearful and Wonderful is an excerpt of a larger work. I’d want to see a more distinct setup and resolution of David’s discontent if this piece is meant to stand by itself.
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