Kevin Snell

The phone didn’t ring. Oliver woke on day fifty-four and lay in the bed and listened to the apartment. The fridge. The pipes. The silence of a space that contained one person and the absence of another. He didn’t reach for his phone. He didn’t check his email. The email didn’t matter anymore. He understood this now with the flat, irrevocable clarity of a man who has discovered that the thing he built was the thing that broke. He got up. He made coffee. He stood at the counter and drank

The insurer didn’t reply. Oliver checked his email on day forty-eight. Nothing. He checked again at noon. Nothing. He checked at three, at five, at eight. The inbox held the same newsletters and the same silence and the same automated confirmations from services he’d forgotten he’d subscribed to, and the absence of a reply was, he told himself, unremarkable. Administrative offices moved at administrative speed. The analysis had been sent on a weekend. Monday would be different. Monday

You’re quieter now. You’ve stopped crying. You’re lying down, I think, because your voice comes muffled, the phone pressed between your face and the pillow, how you always hold it when you’re about to fall asleep. “Thank you,” you say. “For what?” “For picking up. For staying on. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here.” “I’m always here.” “I know. You’re the only one I’d ever call.” A long breath. “I wish you were here for real. Actually here. In Chicago.” Wit

He called his mother on day forty-six. She answered on the third ring. She said, “You said you’d call soon. That was four days ago.” Not accusatory. Factual. The voice of a woman who had learned to measure her son’s wellbeing by the intervals between his communications and who had been counting. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” “How’s the ankle?” “Better. Still in the boot. I can stand on the crutches.” “Are you eating properly?” “Yes.” “Are you actually eating

Evan took the same table. It was free, the two-seater by the window, with the river black beyond the glass and steam clouding the lower half of the pane. Beside the chair Cian had been too large for three Wednesdays ago, Evan waited for the old fear to attach itself. The fear didn’t come. The café was only a café. Aston Quay ran with rain outside. In here wet coats hung off the chair-backs, every second accent was American, and the coffee machine ground loud enough to swallow whol

12:14 a.m. “X.” It’s barely a breath. “I’m here.” “I think he’s gone.” You looked. Of course you looked. Up in your dark window the slats bent apart and dropped shut again, and whatever you saw, it wasn’t me. “You looked,” I say. “I peeked. Just for a second. He’s not under the tree anymore.” “Okay. That’s good.” “Is it?” Your voice wobbles. “What if he’s coming up? What if he’s in the building?” “Is anybody buzzing?” “No.” “Hear anybody on

The story is written and the posts are on autopilot.. This is my first adventure into psychological stuff. But... let's just say that X has an obsessive personality. 😬

Julien left on a Tuesday. He’d arranged things before he went. Oliver watched him do it. The phone calls, the quiet logistics, the pattern of a man who handled practical problems as naturally as breathing. He called the apartment owner, a woman named Claudette who lived in the building next door, and explained the situation in French. The injury, the recovery timeline, the need to extend. Oliver listened from the sofa and understood none of the words and all of the tone. Julien was polite,

“My sister will ask you questions,” Cian said. They were halfway up the road from the seafront, walking into a Sunday wind that had already taken the warmth out of Evan’s ears. Cian had a bottle of wine in one hand and, in the other, a paper bag of the bread Orla had told him not to bring and he’d bought anyway. “People ask me questions every day.” “Not like Orla.” “Does she use equipment?” “Only if you’re evasive.” Evan’s hands were cold even at the bottom of his c

12:12 a.m. “X? You still there?” “Still here.” “You went quiet.” “I’m listening to you breathe,” I say. It’s true, and you laugh through your nose because it landed as a joke. “I keep thinking he’s on the stairs,” you say. “Every couple of minutes I hear the door.” “The door hasn’t gone.” “How would you know?” “Because you’d have stopped breathing. You stop breathing when you hear something. You’ve done it twice tonight.” That’s true too. Most of what

Julien didn’t start with Thomas. He started with the mountain. He sat in the chair across from the sofa where Oliver lay with his boot propped on pillows and he talked about Mont Blanc the way he talked about all mountains. Specifically, precisely, with the attention of a man who had spent his adult life reading rock and weather and the margin between what was safe and what wasn’t. “The route was on the Franco side,” he said. “Above the Goûter Hut. It is a route I had done—I had walked

Evan woke before the alarm with the answer already in him. The room was dark except for the orange line under the curtain. Cian slept on his back beside him, one arm above his head, the other across his stomach. The duvet had fallen low enough to show the dark hair over his chest and the pale remains of the harness marks at his hips. His breath moved the whole width of him. Asleep, Cian couldn’t catch him staring. The sheets still smelled of last night. Every stop had ended in ano

You went to your mom’s in Joliet. You told me three weeks ahead, groaning about it. Aunt Denise would ask why you weren’t married. Your cousin’s kids would ask why you didn’t have a girlfriend. And your mom would make the green bean casserole with the canned onions and cry into her napkin after her second glass of wine because your dad never calls. You took the train out Wednesday afternoon. I was on the platform at Union Station when you got on, because I wanted to see you go. You climbed

The ambulance took forty minutes to reach them. Oliver sat on the wall and counted the minutes as he’d counted steps on the descent. Small numbers. Manageable. The rain had stopped and the road was wet and shining and a woman walking a dog on the other side looked at them once and then looked away with the studied disinterest of someone who had decided this wasn’t her concern. Julien sat on the wall. His hands on his knees, still, the hands that had wrapped the bandage and carried both pack

Evan wrote the message before he got out of bed. Will you meet me after work? He didn’t add an apology. The apology was true, but putting it in a text would make Cian receive it alone, between jobs, with no face attached and no way to stop Evan arranging the whole conversation before either man entered it. Evan had spent three days writing versions and deleting them. The long ones buried the apology under explanation, and the precise ones were cold enough to pass for a legal defence. O