I woke up on a Friday slightly hungover from drinking Florida Man. I’d fallen asleep on the couch and didn’t make it to bed until 4:44 am. The mail came early and there was a GQ magazine. I wasn’t GQ, but my father, a retired postal worker, remained obsessed with the mail.

“Do you have any god damn idea how cheap a magazine subscription is these days?” he said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Dirt cheap, boy.”

“Brilliant.”

“I’m going to subscribe you to fifty.”

“That seems reasonable.”

“The mail needs the volume.”

That’s why I got the magazine. I didn’t really look at it until I tossed it on the table. Timothy Chalamet was on the cover in a pose I’d imagine is intended to look sexy. I picked it up and walked over to my wife who was sitting on the couch watching the new season of The Mandalorian without me.

“Is this what women find attractive these days?”

She considered the cover and shrugged; she was more of a Pedro Pascal type.

“I could flick this little bastard away,” I said.

She offered no response.

“I think I might need to go to Hollywood and bring back the man,” I said.

And that’s when she started laughing. She paused The Mandalorian and continued laughing. She laughed and laughed and laughed until I went outside. I sat on the patio sofa and opened a beer. The moon was visible in the blue sky. It was the day before Halloween. Odie the dog trudged out to comfort me in solidarity. He didn’t seem too fucking happy to do it. I guzzled half the beer. She was still inside laughing. The timbre of it floated out into the yard.

Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His work is forthcoming in Gargoyle, JMWW, The Loch Raven Review and Bending Genres. He has never been published in The Threepenny Review, but they have sent him 117 form rejections within 24 hrs.