Excerpt from Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1.
INSTRUCTIONS

He leaves her a series of drawings on a sheet of typing paper. It must have taken him a long time—he probably got off to a late start. She only wanted to know the code to the laundry room, where his mailbox key is.

She lies in bed with his cats, studying it. At the top, there is a banner like the kind waving behind an airplane, advertising two-for-one drink specials at the beach: In the event of my unlikely death, and underneath it a headstone: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt. There's a single flower next to the headstone, a few wisps of grass. There are boxes labeled GATOS, COFFEE, PAR AVION, BASURA, and one with nothing but a question mark. In the box labeled PAR AVION, he tells her that the mail key is hanging next to the brass knuckles. The GATOS section takes up most of the left side. There's a diagram of a litter box showing how the pee clumps and advising her to scoop at least twice a day so the cats "don't get weird." BASURA . . . in the parking lot. Does he think she's incapable of taking out the trash and feeding some cats?

She gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen to drink the last of his coffee, which is cold, so she puts ice cubes in it, milk and sugar. She stirs it with a clean spoon and places the spoon in the sink. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, she thinks, standing there in her socks.

She opens his cabinets to look at the same things that are always in his cabinets and which are entirely more interesting than the things in her own. There are still plenty of candy bars that his aunt brought back from New Zealand, frogs on the wrappers. There are Tic Tacs and many bottles of olive oil and spices from the Mediterranean grocery. Above his refrigerator, four boxes of cereal. She will eat cereal and candy bars and pick up sandwiches from Little Deli. She'll ride his stationary bike while watching The Office and Girls. Already, she misses her apartment with all of her books, and her balcony where she can smoke without the old ladies watching her, the cats gazing at her from their perch.

She finishes her coffee and puts the cup in the sink next to the spoon. Despite the COFFEE box, and the instructions therein (just YouTube CHEMEX, filters above sink), she won't drink it at his house. He has too many ways of making it, all of which seem unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming.

She puts her shoes back on and tells the cats goodbye. She likes these cats only because they are his, because their presence makes them more like a family. They creep around the apartment at night searching for something to knock over, wake her up early to eat. When she's reading in bed, they stick their nails into the pages of her book one at a time and pause to observe her reaction.

She drives to work thinking about the things she knows that have hurt him: his cousin's death, broken bones, the time he swallowed a bunch of pills and drank too much vodka because he was young and overseas. She thinks about the things that have hurt her and then she thinks about beauty and how little of it she sees in even beautiful things. She wonders if people who've been hurt more see more beauty. She wonders how a few strung-together words can seem so meaningful when she doesn't believe them at all.

At lunch, she texts her boyfriend to ask if he wrote it.

It's from Slaughterhouse-Five, he texts back. Of course it is. It's the kind of thing hipsters tattoo on their arms—The heart is a lonely hunter, Not all who wander are lost, Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

She's disappointed but should have caught the allusion.

A few hours later, she's back at his apartment. She accepts a stack of coupons from his next-door neighbor as she unlocks the door.

 "Thank you," she says. "This is great."

Credit line: Excerpted from Always Happy Hour: Stories by Mary Miller. Copyright © 2017 by Mary Miller. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved