Paula Whyman

My new boss, Chick, was a morbidly obese manic off his meds who hailed from a tiny town I’d never heard of—​Wassily, Louisiana—​a town so small, Chick claimed, the shotgun shacks only had space for pistols. In summers, he told me, you wished for a pistol to shoot your wife or maybe end it all, what with the stillborn air, the chiggers, the mold. I told him my family had lived without air-​conditioning in DC until I was nine, so I knew something about swampy heat. He didn’t respond—​he practically ignored me—​and I didn’t mention the tiny brick house, which was still superior to anything that might be called a shack.