Survival Kit: After Dinner Conversation, #17

By Christine Seifert

Synopsis: A wife in an unhappy marriage gets caught in a freak snowstorm with her husband and sees the opportunity to end her "suffering."

After Dinner Conversation is a growing series of short stories across genres to draw out deeper discussions with friends and family. Each story is an accessible example of an abstract ethical or philosophical idea and is accompanied by suggested discussion questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: After Dinner Conversation
• Release date: Dec 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393988458

Book preview

Survival Kit

After Dinner Conversation Series

I MARRIED ANDY MORRISON four months after we met. It was a mistake, the marriage, but I didn’t realize it until after the wedding weekend and by then it was done. Andy had gone along with the marriage plan gamely, though I guessed that was because I was only his second real girlfriend, an initially gratifying position that turned sour when, a few months after the wedding, I ran into Girlfriend Number One at the car wash. We recognized each other immediately, and while I would have been content to simply hide behind the spinning rack of air freshener trees, Girlfriend Number One took off her giant sunglasses and said, I just want you to know, I don’t envy you.

ARE YOU COLD? ANDY asked as he arranged pieces of newspaper over his legs. He was the only person I knew under the age of fifty who read newspapers on actual paper.

No, I said, though I could feel the wind blowing through the cracks of the car window. It was still light out—just barely—but the late-winter weather was bad enough that all I could see was a grey-white wall of snow. The cold was settling under my skin, around my bones, threading through my blood.

I’m glad we don’t have the girls, he said. Can you imagine? His newspaper blanket fluttered. He was wearing children’s earmuffs and gloves that couldn’t cover his hands. Andy and the girls loved the desert-dry heat of Arizona. All three wore winter coats if the mercury dropped below sixty.

What do you think they are doing right now? I asked. It was a game we played when we were alone, a conversation without stakes, one that never ended, even when it grew old. I think Natalie has already announced that she wants chicken McNuggets.

His turn: Natasha has colored on the walls and eaten glue at least twice.