Bathroom Monologue: When I Read Historical Fiction

His hypoallergenic dog fed and napping downstairs, and his wife having texted that she’ll be locked up until six in the Hayworth divorce case, he sits down to write. He sits at a prefab desk, in his memory-foam office chair, wrists resting on an ergonomic keyboard that he bought at 24% off on Amazon, eyes flipping between his ultra-thin monitor and the view of the suburb out his glass window. The urge to go for a popsicle goads him, but his eyes fall on his grandmother’s photo, hanging on the wall. She’ll give him hell when he makes his weekly call if he’s behind on word count again.

So he consults two tabs in Firefox and the text book balanced on his waist basket. He sucks a poppy seed from between his teeth, then shakes his head at the confluence of claims between the three sources. He scratches at the scabs from yesterday’s vaccination – the soreness is obnoxious – before convincing himself of plausibility.

‘No,’ he thinks to his fingers. ‘People aren’t really like that. More believable if Caesar had…’

And he types what really happened in the Roman Senate over two thousand years ago.