Excerpt from Always Happy Hour by Mary Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

They talk for ten more minutes, all the while she is wondering whether to tell him that his cat has probably swallowed a razor blade and is going die. When she hears his voice change—he's ready to get off the phone—she tells him. The blade popped off, she says, and I can't find it. I think she may have swallowed it.

A cat wouldn't swallow a razor blade, he says, but she's not so sure. She is confused about what cats will and won't do. They don't get out of the way when she swings his kettlebells, for example, and one time she knocked the male in the head with a crack her boyfriend heard from the other room.

They say I love you and goodbye—I love you I love you goodbye—and it's quiet again. She's afraid her boyfriend will die in a car accident or will drunkenly fall down the stairs and break his neck. That she will never see him again. She turns on the TV and tries to find something to watch, thinking about the dream he had recently, how he woke her in the middle of the night to tell her about it: we were in a boat and there was a great storm, he said. And I lost my oars so I paddled with my arms. And the piranhas ate my arms, chewed them down to nothing but I kept paddling. I kept paddling and paddling, trying to get us to shore. And that was the end: her boyfriend paddling madly with his nubby arms in an attempt to save them. It was a dream about worry, she knows, as nearly all dreams are. He worries his love will run out. He loves her so much and it scares him because maybe their love isn't sustainable— perhaps they should each find someone they could love less. Or maybe she simply isn't the girl he thought she was, the one he wanted her to be. She has disappointed him. She has disappointed herself by disappointing him and she can't stop disappointing him because she's disappointed that he's disappointed and so on. Everything is fine, she told him, smoothing back his hair and taking hold of his arm. We're happy, she assured him. There are no great storms here.

Credit line: Excerpted from Always Happy Hour: Stories by Mary Miller. Copyright © 2017 by Mary Miller. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved