Couldn't Work

So I worked. It's not an uncommon occurrence.

I was supposed to get some work done on a book project but turns out I wasn’t in the mood. I tried. I got out all my notes and tinkered in the margins. Not happening. I had a thought about another little story instead.

*

TRAINING

He transgressed. She transgressed. They transgressed. But this was just conjugation, nothing real, a trick of words strung together. They were in a train, traveling south from the city to the house in the country. Her parents owned it, had owned it for as long as he had known her. He had visited once a year, in summer, eaten food that was provided him, drunk wine he never paid for, smiled beatifically. Her mother called him “the mendicant.” Each year his dreams grew wilder and his temperament more timid. He kept a book of all the things he had not been able to do and knew that she did, too. She looked across the table at him the way a person looked at a problem. Today, speeding through the countryside, he imagined their arrival. He would set down the bags, his and hers, hug her mother, shake her father’s hand. He would begin in his mind to count the seconds that these people were taking from him, these people who had made his wife the kind of woman she was, spotting a man like him across the concert, waiting until the band onstage took a break, gliding to him, listening to his joke about the dinosaur costumes, not just listening but laughing, stepping in so that her breast flattened against his chest, teaching him to like—to depend upon—his own rewarded helplessness. She cheated so much that he couldn’t even keep count anymore. He drank and chatted up women he met at night school. The train shot south. Every tie it crossed, perpendicular to its path, pointed outward at options. But there was no way to leave the track, or at least no way to do it without bravery. “It will be nice to see your parents,” he said, and she patted his hand. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]