MARRIAGE, a novella

A change! I'm working on something = sanity for a writer.

MARRIAGE, a novella

Several days after the event, Robert Wilson calculated that at the very moment his wife Amanda was crashing to the sidewalk, her heart stopped, her brain deprived of oxygen, he was at the travel agent booking his flight to Tucson, an exploratory visit prior to moving there alone. He hadn't told her his plans yet but didn't expect her to be surprised. It was she, after all, who had told him some months ago, at the end of one of his tirades against the gentrification of Portland, which had been as close to an ideal city as he could imagine in the 1980s, that if he disliked Portland so much, maybe he should move. He was astounded to hear this – from his wife! But it got him brooding about the possibility of moving away alone and redefining their marriage as a two-household arrangement. Maybe she could spend winters with him in Tucson, and he could return to Portland to spend summers with her. What he knew was that his wife seldom was home, and he could spend time without her in warm Tucson sunshine more happily than in gentrified, damp,and wet Portland, a city filled with ghosts from the 1980s,