MID LIFE CRISIS
By Gareth L Powell

One morning, as he was getting ready for work, Lester looked in the mirror and saw two reflections staring back at him. The first showed him as a slim, confident young man, a successful novelist and father, the kind of man he’d always wanted to be. The second showed the real picture. In reality, he was going to be thirty-nine in a few months; he was single, stuck in middle management, working long hours, and staggering home every night too tired to do anything more than drink beer and watch TV.

For a long time, he sat on his unmade bed, listening to the sound of traffic in the street outside. Then he rang his office and quit his job. He threw his business cards in the bin. He gave his landlord a month’s rent in lieu of notice, and used what little savings he had left to buy an old VW camper van. He packed a few warm clothes, some books and an old manual typewriter.

He headed north into the hills, where pine forests filled the valleys and sheep grazed the high slopes. He ate once a day. He stopped shaving and learned how to cook over an open fire. He stayed away from alcohol and cigarettes, and read at night by the gently buzzing light of a paraffin lamp. In the mornings, he wrote, battering out stories on the typewriter, page after page.

He wrote about his childhood. He wrote about music and girls and dancing, and the peculiar pains of adolescence. He threw everything he had onto the page. He wrote about loss and missed opportunity, and he wrote about the beauty of the world and the lessons he’d learned in his life. For the first time in years he felt clear and focused, and his mind bubbled like a mountain brook.

Sometimes, he would leave the van and hike up into the hills, returning at dusk exhausted and happy, his skin tingling from the wind and sun. Other times, he would lie out in his sleeping bag under the stars listening to the crickets shuffling in the long grass, watching the great vault of the night sky wheel overhead.

On one of those nights, curled up beside the red embers of his cooking fire, he saw something in the sky. A few minutes after sunset, a long, dark storm cloud rose over the hills in the east, bristling with electricity, blowing before it an immense, blood red cross that span slowly across his field of vision, shedding sparks like a pinwheel, screaming like a crashing jet. Lester cowered in his sleeping bag until he fell asleep, dropping into a series of terrifying, exhausted nightmares.

The following morning he didn’t write. He couldn’t. The urge had gone. Instead, he rose early and packed his typewriter. He wanted to get back to the city. His need for company had reasserted itself and needed to see a friendly face.

He thought he might give Sherry a call. She had worked in his office, before he quit. She was blonde and cute and used to laugh at his jokes. He had her phone number somewhere, and he was going to give her a call, maybe invite her out for coffee.

As he drove away from his campsite, his front tires crunched over the embers of the previous night’s fire. They were cold and grey in the sharp dawn light.

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