It was a bad day. The weather was beautiful. Mike had to wear his gear, vest and all, on the top of a one-story dollar store across the street from a fast food joint where a number of people were being held hostage. Mike scoped the place out. The front was all windows, easy pickings, but towards the back, with the fryer, fridge and bathrooms, there was no way to know what was going on. The building was surrounded, nobody was getting out, but there were too many places to hide.

From his vantage point, Mike couldn’t see any employees, only five customers who looked confused, as if the only thing wrong was the sudden presence of the police. A young couple, probably teenagers, sat to the left, looking as if they were telling grand, sarcastic stories to each other. The boy was trying to grow facial hair, but had only succeeded in growing a set of grimy, shrunken pine needles on his upper lip. It made him look a little like a rat. The girl was alright, but she was getting ugly quick. She seemed to be happy to have someone who pretended to listen to her. Up by the counter, two people stood in line, like they were waiting for their orders. Because of where he was positioned, Mike couldn’t see their heads, but judging by the way they slowly shuffled back and forth, they weren’t any threat.

The fifth sat by herself close to the window. Her hair was dark and she tied it in the back. She looked like she’d been out of college for a couple of years, at the point where Mike wondered what she was doing alone in a fast food joint. He tried to guess which car in the parking lot was hers and thought about why she hadn’t gone to the drivethru.

She pushed around her food sardonically. When she picked up her sandwich, she bit it like she was criticizing it, squinting her eyes, and when she put it down, she grinned mysteriously and put her hand in front of her mouth. She leaned back to stretch and was just on the verge of fat, but not yet. Mike thought about it, and decided that if he were given, for some godawful reason, the right to shoot at will, he would pick her. She was the only one who stood out, and if somehow it was established that those five people were the only five people in the building, that the situation had devolved into an emergency, and that Mike was the only person who could solve the problem, he would shoot her. Maybe it was just because he liked her, but he would shoot her.

Just as Mike was settling in for a long period of negotiation, where his main duty would be to watch, report, and wait for orders, he was suddenly ordered to stand down and report back to his commander. There was no hostage situation, it turned out. Some moron outside the restaurant had thought he was witnessing a robbery and made a confused 911 call which, somewhere along the hierarchy in the command center, was translated into a full-scale emergency. Mike looked up and saw a news chopper lingering in the air. All this fuss for nothing.

“I thought I saw you on the roof,” his wife said.

“Where?” Mike asked.

“The chopper saw you.” It had been all over the ten o’clock news, but Mike hadn’t been home by then. Paperwork, he said. “Even if nothing happened, every fucking department needs to know.” Laura had a good laugh about how she recognized him. “I mean, you were right on the roof! Every time they moved the camera over, it was you.”

“How did you recognize me?”

“I don’t know. He laid on the ground like how you lay on the ground.”

“How do I lay on the ground?”

“I don’t know . . . like an alert walrus. A walrus who was really paying attention.” Laura thought about how he looked and how she described him. She had waited up for him just so she could have this little moment. When he’d come in at 11:30, wobbly from all the paperwork, she was sitting on the couch with some coffee, lifting the cup to her pale lips with a slender, skeletal arm. “It was funny, the way you were lying there.” She started laughing a little, as if to herself. “And when you got up . . . I don’t know, it didn’t look like a police operation.”

“By then it wasn’t. It was over.”

“You just looked like a guy who’d been lying on the roof, and now he’s done and he’s going off to have a few beers.” She smiled a bit, then settled back down, looking genially over to where Mike sat across from her. She had said what she stayed up to say. There was nothing else to do. Somehow it seemed like there shouldn’t have been this emptiness. Her comment should’ve sparked something, a response from Mike or an understanding between them, even if it was hostile and ended in a fight. Instead there was nothing, as if her words had disappeared like bullets made of loose sand.

Mike stood up. Laura thought it was probably time for bed, but then stopped to say, “I’m gonna . . . head on out.” He spoke with uncertainty, like someone whose brain wasn’t connected right, who would decide to follow small impulses he neither controlled nor understood. “I’m going out.”

“Where?”

“. . . To see some people . . . there are people doing something.” It couldn’t exactly be called a lie. It could barely be called a statement. Mike turned to leave. He didn’t want to explain himself, because he couldn’t. Laura put on a concerned look but didn’t do anything because the sudden emptiness in the room prevented her from thinking she could do anything at all. “I’m going.”

“. . . Don’t stay too late.”

“I won’t.”

Mike didn’t know quite what he had done. He was trying to remember what it felt like to be called down, because he didn’t want to admit it felt like nothing. Like a long tension and then waiting, not even relief from the tension but nothing. He saw a team rushing in and making havoc, or a single gunman giving himself up, but he didn’t see himself standing up and walking away. To get ready for one of those events, it took more mental preparation than Mike cared to admit, and when that preparation was for nothing, he couldn’t brush it off. It was getting harder to pretend that he could.

Off in a corner of a bar, he drank, not quite desperately but patiently. He looked towards the other end and thought he saw one of the women from before staring into a beer by herself, the dark-haired one who had pushed around her food. She had a fuller figure in the middle of the night. He thought about walking up to her and saying, “Hey! I know you! I thought about shooting you.” But at this distance he wasn’t even sure she existed. And what would he have done if she had been there? Scared her off by telling her what she looks like through a scope? Coaxed his way into her apartment only to emerge impotent and more useless?

He couldn’t drink anymore. He paid his tab and walked over to his car. He drove perfectly, as if he were sleeping peacefully. He went home and lay down next to his wife. It was pathetic.

It had been a bad day.