Chapter 11

Mitchell was grading ESL essays when his phone lit up with an unknown number. He let it ring.

The stack of papers in front of him blurred as he listened. Another semester of correcting fractured syntax and misplaced articles—work that drained him but paid just enough to keep the rent-stabilized walk-up in Bushwick. He sometimes loved his work but often hated it with a quiet, grinding despair, the kind that settled in the bones after years of pretending enthusiasm for lesson plans he forced himself to create on time, depleting creative energies he might otherwise have put to better use—or so he told himself. Would he really have succeeded at writing or anything else if free to devote time to that? He had become skilled at suppressing such doubts, but they surfaced regularly all the same.