The Forms of Water

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HENRY AUBERON, NEARING FIFTY AND WITHOUT A CAR, SAT IN a shabby living room that didn’t belong to him. The tenant before him had had a cat, which had shredded the armchair and sprayed on the rugs. A water-stained book propped the window open; the gutter above the window leaked and the foundation below it shed chunks of mortar the size of finger bones. Had the house been his, Henry would have fixed these problems instantly. But the house belonged to his sister’s ex-husband, who had grudgingly offered it when Henry had found himself with nowhere else to go.

The house was for sale and might disappear from under him at any minute, but Henry refused to think of what would happen then. He sat in his armchair and refused to think of his own lost home or of the wreckage he had made of his grandparents’ farm in Coreopsis. He refused to think of the foreclosures, the bankruptcy proceedings, the shame, the failure, his amazing errors; he refused to think of his wife, who had thrown him out; he refused to think of the drunken accident that had cost him his driver’s license and reduced him to walking to the temporary job that he also refused to consider, his three-to-eleven shift at the box factory near the Rochester stadium.

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