Happily Engaged

By Ben Roth

HAPPILY ENGAGED is BEN ROTH's debut fiction collection, 16 tales of social disconnection and dysfunctions set against a backdrop of urban gentrification, digital distancing, and isolation in crowded places, where technology indequately bridges the distances between us. The stories are punchy, gut-twisting explorations of the damage inflicted on the modern psyche, but they are also wistful explorations of the sacrifices made of us in the modern age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ben Roth
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201892623

Ben Roth

Ben Roth retired early after a brief stint trading bonds in Chicago. He’s travelled by land from Texas to Buenos Aires and later from Spain to Southeast Asia, before settling down in Austin, Texas where he builds creative, unique real estate projects and tries to write, taking breaks to travel with his wife and kids anytime school is out.

Book preview

Color Paralysis

The fluorescent lights must be thirty feet above. I remember how big this place is every time I look up. I wonder how much bigger it seems to my daughter. She knows our store’s color is orange and our competitor’s is blue, and she is only two years old. Grey concrete floors, long aisles, identical in every store, orange smocks the same in every city of every state. Nuts and screws in aisle seven, lumber at one end, garden supplies at the other, and, somewhere in between, doors and windows and appliances and everything else that small hardware stores used to sell. And paint, where I work six days a week. Exteriors, bedrooms, offices, ceilings, furniture, everything needs colors and red, blue and green don’t exist anymore.

She walks up to me and I try to avoid her, stocking items alone, keeping to myself. I look around at this massive box I’m in. I look up at the birds in the rafters, who fly in and out as they please, looking down at me.

She stands there and coughs, paint samples in her wrinkled hand.

Sir, she calls out.

I am 29. ‘Sir’ somehow feels condescending. I reluctantly make eye contact and move toward her.

Do you have anything lighter than this blue?

I take her sample and show her the larger rolodex of even more blues.

Something lighter than Tahitian Breeze? She holds out one of her many samples.

I look at Tahitian Breeze with disgust and picture anything but lying on a beach. Try this one, I say. Sea Ice. I hesitate to say the color’s name and wonder if we have a store in Anchorage, in Moscow, in Greenland.

No she says, holding her sample up to the rolodex. That looks the same shade. She pulls out another wad of samples from somewhere deep in her purse, the ones with whites, near-whites, hints of blue but still white. These are too white, but maybe you can make something in between.

I say nothing as I mix and create with equal parts of Frost and Rain Water and Island Oasis. There may have been a Dew Pointe and a Clear Vista. I see my lunch break far away, in a back room of orange plastic chairs, beige tables, grey tile, and a brown paper bag with my sandwich, turkey on wheat.

I pull the quarts out of the mixer, place them on the metal counter, and wait for her to pick them up. She does not approve. How many different brands do you have? she asks.

Behr and Glidden, and the ones you chose.

She says they won’t work. She says she needs more options.

I tell her I can make Sea Ice lighter, but she says it’s too blue. I say we can make Frost more blue but she says that one is too light. What else would you like me to do, ma’am?

I want to know how many more options we have, in between these two colors.

I see the fans overhead and the ducting and the electrical wires running in conduit. There are infinite colors, I say.

What do you mean?

She seems upset that we have what she wants. Yes, we have thousands of colors and can mix them in millions of ways, so we have infinite colors.

No. You have lots of colors, maybe millions. But not infinite.

No, Ma’am. We have infinite colors. The problem is you.

A manager gets called, a third warning is issued, and my shift ends early. I walk to the bus stop and imagine her going home in her aqua-colored sport utility vehicle, high above the road, driving on paved suburban streets. Mine will be a bumpy ride but I don’t mind it. Maybe I can trade in my orange smock for a blue one or get a job at an ice cream shop where the flavors are finite. My daughter would like that, I’m sure. The buildings on the way home are not obscure colors. They are brown and beige and gray. The sky is plain old blue. The clouds are white, not frost.

A Cup of Coffee

Abell rings above me as I push open the glass door and inhale a cloud of coffee. I spend the three minutes queuing between the velvet ropes, staring at the woman in front of me, knowing how often to look away from the flesh between her knee boots and the hem of her plaid miniskirt to read the menu of fifty options chalked on the wall, none of which simply say coffee. I look from the obese man in front of miniskirt lady, to the younger, less-attractive woman working the register, and then to the work-from-home laptops and phones and tablets with people connected to them. I wonder if I am not looking at miniskirt’s thighs enough, nice as they are, wonder if I am too discreet to enjoy these precious moments, so I steal more of her from the corner of my eye. I’m attractive enough, dressed appropriately so as to not deter the return of my attention, but I’m no match for her phone.

I woke up earlier this morning still in a dream, seeing everyone with three heads and unfamiliar body parts, moving in a way that I couldn’t mimic, speaking in tongues, singing odd chants, and ignoring me, only to wake up for real later, get dressed, walk past strangers in a crowded downtown, and feel not much different. I sometimes invent dreams to explain how I feel. Others don’t understand specific points within an argument, while I don’t understand entire premises. In my made-up dreams, people argue and discuss but I don’t understand what beings they are, or if they even see the same world. I pretend to understand and be normal enough and try to move through the world as a human should.

The man in front pays, then miniskirt orders something sweet, sipping on a straw as she leaves the store, drawing the sugar down her throat, into her belly, making its way to those wonderful thighs that would become an ounce meatier. I will likely never see any of her again.

Medium drip coffee please.

Our barista has acne but isn’t unattractive, pudgy but not fat. Her eyes aren’t any color, and her dark straight hair is mostly covered by her cap. We don’t have medium, only grande, tall or small. 

A tall. I don’t want to learn how a tall is different from a grande. 

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