Everything You Need
by William Cass

Alice was forty-nine, overweight, and had never been married. At noon, like always, she left the large downtown department store where she’d worked most of her adult life for her lunch break. She sat on her regular bench in the little plaza off the busy street, opened her paper sack, ate her sandwich and orange, and watched the passers-by. Any shy attempts she made to catch someone’s eye were met with disregard or disinterest. It was a late-fall day hung with low clouds; she pulled the collar of her gray overcoat up under her chin against the chill.

After she finished eating, Alice threw away her trash and began her slow walk back towards the store. She kept to the curb along the sidewalk, casually checking meters next to parked cars as she went. When she came to one that had expired, she took a few coins out of her coat pocket and inserted them in the meter. She did this a half-dozen times before she got back to the store. No one took any notice of her.

Alice spent most of the afternoon in the housewares department repricing items for an upcoming sale. She got off at five and walked to the drug store on the corner. She took some

time to select a new romantic greeting card, tucked it inside her purse after purchasing it, then waited in front of the store for the five-twenty bus. When it came, she chose a middle seat against the window. It was just under a half-hour ride to her apartment building. Sometimes on the way, Alice took the band off her right ring finger, replaced it on her left, and imagined someone waiting for her at home. But that afternoon, she didn’t. Instead, she just sat with her hands folded over her purse in her lap and watched the light outside continue its descent towards gloaming. To the east, the clouds had become heavy-bellied. The occasional trees along the boulevard had lost most of their leaves. At one point, the bus paused for a traffic light next to a schoolyard where three little girls skipped rope, two twirling and one jumping; Alice smiled at the sight and the memories it stirred.

When the bus approached her stop, Alice opened her purse and took out that afternoon’s note. The message she’d written on the post-it was a variation on all the others: a combination of encouragement, acknowledgement, and hope. It was already folded into quarters. Because the seats next to her and across the aisle had remained unoccupied, she didn’t need to keep the gesture of dropping it at her feet as furtive as she often had to. She left it there when she got off the bus. She was never sure if the notes were found by other passengers or whoever cleaned the bus at the end of the night, but it didn’t matter to her either way.

Her apartment was on the old brick building’s top floor facing the street. Its four small rooms awaited her with customary silence. She hung her overcoat on the hook inside the door and set her purse on the coffee table. In the kitchen, she took a low-calorie pre-packaged dinner out of the freezer – something involving chicken, noodles, peas, and a cream sauce – and started it going in the microwave. Then she went into the bathroom and washed her hands. As she dried them, a tired, worn face stared back at her from the mirror; she tugged at the wrinkles that crept from the corners of her eyes and mouth trying to flatten them until the microwave bell made its ding.

Back in the kitchen, a gasp of fragrant steam escaped when she tore the cardboard lid off the dinner. She stirred its contents with a fork and set it on a hot pad. From a cupboard above the microwave, she took a juice glass and bottle of rye whiskey, filled the glass, then carried her dinner into the living room and placed it on the coffee table. She sat down on the couch in front of it and turned on the floor lamp next to her; its brown paper shade threw a cone of yellow light across that small portion of the room.

While the meal cooled, Alice took the greeting card out of her purse and re-read it several times, sipping from the glass. Its rhyming verse was embossed in swirling gold font. She opened the coffee table’s drawer and dropped the card on top of the pile of others like it.

Alice thought: I wish I could stop buying you these that I’ll never, ever send.

She closed the drawer and took another swallow from her drink. A siren wound away in the distance across town. The aroma from the dinner wafted up to her. An old woman’s walker scraped across the floor in the apartment next to her, another solitary person she’d nodded to often, but had never met. From the apartment on the other side, a cat mewed. For several seconds, a roll of thunder rumbled, followed by the first patter of rain. Alice sat perfectly still, clutching her glass on her knee, staring in front of her where the room had grown almost completely dark.

Into that darkness, she whispered, “You have everything you need. You don’t want for a thing.

© William Cass, 2020

William Cass has had 200 short stories accepted for publication in a variety of literary magazines such as december, Briar Cliff Review, and The Boiler. He was a finalist in short fiction and novella competitions at Glimmer Train and Black Hill Press, received three Pushcart nominations, and won writing contests at Terrain.org and The Examined Life Journal. He lives in San Diego, California.

Everything You Need was read by Olivia Killingsworth on Wednesday, 5th February 2020 for Intimacy & Isolation