Chapter 9
Chapter 9 — The Inventory
Rolandas, shaken by the cumulative weight of his encounters with the refugee market, Regina's honesty, and Elena's probing fiction, spirals into a dark reassessment of his life. He meets Zvonkus and unloads a raw, profane confession about the worthlessness of his nostalgia and self-pity compared to real suffering. Zvonkus responds with blunt pragmatism. Rolandas later meets Elena, who shares a darker passage from her novel about menopause and the ending of things—both biological and metaphorical. The chapter ends with Rolandas alone at night, stripped of his usual embellishments, confronting the void beneath his stories.
He started the evening by looking at it.
Not metaphorically. He stood in his kitchen with the drawer open—the one that had been sticking for weeks, the one Marius had probably fixed in Regina's house without ceremony or applause—and he looked at what was inside. Batteries of unknown charge. A screwdriver with a stripped head. Takeout menus from restaurants that had closed during the first year of the pandemic and never reopened. A key he no longer remembered the origin of. Receipts so faded the thermal ink had retreated to blank white strips, ghosts of purchases he couldn't recall making.
This was his inventory. This was what remained after decades of accumulating a life: a drawer full of useless objects kept by inertia, none of it meaning anything to anyone, least of all to him.
Keep reading "Chapter 9 — The Inventory"
Open the same story in AIBookCraft. Later chapters may require an active subscription.
Free on iOS & Android · No signup to read