‘The Yellow’ by Samantha Hunt
From The New Yorker:
With his mother and father out of town for the weekend, Roy was left to forage for food in their nearly empty refrigerator. Was he physically or mentally unable to go grocery shopping? To order takeout from a restaurant? No, he wasn’t.
Roy nibbled on a raw-onion-and-Cheddar sandwich, but the rattling house unnerved him and the sandwich was too strong. He felt exposed in the kitchen. What made a house rattle? He couldn’t say. He abandoned his meal on the countertop and switched on the living-room TV. He sat through the evening sitcoms, the late news, the late shows, and the start of a movie he’d not seen since 1985, telling himself that the noises he’d heard were cable wires scraping against the siding in the wind. Even if they weren’t.
At forty-two, he was living in his parents’ house again, eating their food, driving their car from job interview to job interview.
“A pity,” his grandmother had decided.
