1/

Lyle washes his blistered hands again. The worst of the sting is in the water’s first touch, fading as he lathers soap into suds and scrapes under his fingernails. Washing helps, he tells himself, wincing as he pats them dry with the fraying yellow hand towel. The sharp bile of the thoughts and the guilt and the doubt ebbs from the back of his throat and allows him a shaking, clear breath.

The project on the table is a collection of five that he’s hand-carving from walnut. Kira lounges with her legs over the arm of the couch, phone held like a book to her chest as she watches him.

She’s looking at his hands. The expression on her face is one she only wears when it gets this bad; he’s not sure she even knows she makes it.

Lyle knows he’s a burden. Kira’s face relaxes then tenses again: whatever she’s trying to figure out how to say is going to hurt him. He turns his attention back to the figures on the table and picks up the D6, smoothing his thumb over its face to still his trembling.

“Does it help to make the dice? When things get hard like this, I mean.”

Palms sweaty, he puts the die back on the table and nods. “It makes sense to me, the system and the rules. It helps me get it right.” The thoughts are coming back. He closes his eyes to try and breathe through them.

“Have you ever made one with an odd number of faces?”

Lyle shakes his head. “It wouldn’t be fair, the math gets all screwed up. It turns into this whole thing where the probability varies based on what surface you’re rolling on.”

“Not every die has to be perfectly fair, you know,” she counters. “Loaded dice exist. I think it’d be cool; you could do it for the novelty.”

A throb starts in his right temple. Doubt creeps up the back of his neck and raises the hair there. He picks up the D6 to examine and measure it once and then again, thinking it might be ruined from the oil on his hands. If he can’t finish this set, everyone will know, and business will suffer. If he can’t finish this set —

“I…no, it has to be just right.” He gets up from the table and goes to the bathroom to wash his hands. Head pounding as he begs his brain to stop, staring at himself, wishing he were someone else. They’re going to fight, he knows, and it’s going to become a big argument and he won’t be able to finish tonight, and every time he needs to come into the bathroom it’s going to be exacerbated.

“I think you should go,” he says, back in the living room. Kira starts to say something but he shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I need to get this work done. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

She blinks a few times, and he can see that she’s hurt, and he wonders how many of his assumptions are real. Alone, he shaves a nearly translucent slice of wood from the D6. He cries. He washes his hands. He cleans the table, and wonders how he managed to screw this up so badly, and thinks about Kira, and doesn’t call her.

When the project is finished up, he packs it away and cleans the table again and tries to journal about his thoughts and his doubts and his guilt. It washes over him again — he sits and doesn’t wash his hands until it’s too overwhelming not to, then cycles between scribbling and staring at the page and waiting for the thoughts again.

He ends up doodling some figures in a margin, sketching the platonic solids and some spirals. There’s still a solid chunk of the walnut left, it’s on his mind as he does some quick math and smiles.

It’s not easy to do – he pulls on gloves while he works and hates their texture and the way they stick to him, pulls them off and puts them on again, tries to work through the anxiety and the thoughts that haunt him, and gets only a few hours of sleep before he has to wake up and catch the bus.

Kira answers on the first knock, and invites him inside and doesn’t say anything as he reaches in his pocket and holds out his hand and lets the die roll off his palm and onto her kitchen table. Head tilted, half smiling, she picks it up and examines it and counts the sides.

“It’s not a fair die,” he says, looking at his shoes. “Right away it fails because it’s not symmetrical. But I think it’s pretty decent. It’d be okay for novelty. It’s just not perfect.”

The die rolls from her hand onto the table again and she smiles, reaching out to pull him into a hug.

“It’s okay,” she says. “None of the best things ever are.”