After that night, Marie and Jones made it a tradition to get drunk on cheap whiskey on Fridays and Fridays alone. It was after the third of these weekly drinking sessions that the rent had been withdrawn from Marie’s bank account. Turns out she had overdrafted. Jones offered the meager sum that was left in their own account, but it was, sadly, not enough to take care of the debt that Marie now owed to the bank. So Jones offered to sell some of their possessions, starting with their clothes. Marie stopped them from doing this, saying that it would be no damn good anyway. If they were to successfully sell their clothes, then they would be tasked with buying new ones, so they were essentially offering to dig themselves a hole financially.

“But I can’t be this much of a burden to you.” Jones said in the first of several arguments about money between the two. “I’ll find somewhere else to go.”

“No, you shouldn’t.” Marie said. “Mr. Ellison went through all of this trouble to set us up in such a nice place and we should at least give it a try until the end of the lease.”

“Tell you what,” Jones started enthusiastically “I’m just about done with ‘The Unbeatable Foe’. I’ll try sending it off to publishers, see if that brings in any more money.” And so their argument cycles went like this for a very long time. At the second promise of a draft soon to come, Marie caught on that Jones was stalling, experiencing writer’s block in the final act of their novel about superheroes.

During one of their weekly whiskey sessions, Jones divulged the plot of the second act to Marie, and Marie was glad to hear it:

In the second act of “The Unbeatable Foe”, the guy who has the power to control time, whose name was revealed to be Grandfather Clock, was approached by the worldly council of superheroes. Sleuth had proposed the initial plan to build the machine that would hold Grandfather Clock, a sort of faraday cage of tachyonic energy that would allow him to harness his time powers and send the world back in time. This was not meant to save Earth or the human race. It was simply something meant to buy time so that the superheroes might amass enough will and intelligence to find a more practical solution for the cosmic wave. Grandfather Clock initially refuses this, but is then persuaded by Knight Errand and Temptress to get into the machine, being that he was a team player this whole time.

Enter the villain, the titular Unbeatable Foe, Christian Campbell. Christian Campbell was the arch-nemesis of Knight Errand, constantly foiled by the hero's superior strength and morals. Mr. Campbell, now in his years of retirement as a supervillain, realizes through sleeper agents that he has planted throughout the council of worldly superheroes that Grandfather Clock is about to step into the faraday cage.

And that’s where Jones had stopped writing. The last act was meant to be a debate, not of fists but a true debate of words, between Christian Campbell and Knight Errand. Ironically enough, Christian Campbell would be arguing the altruistic side against Knight Errand’s utilitarian side, something that Jones had pointed out as a clever little subtext they had come up with. But, when it came down to actually writing the debate between the two characters, Jones drew a blank, which they said was unusual for them. Usually, they loved writing dialog. They had gotten their start writing plays for their elementary school playwriting contest, something that Marie would also find out during this weekly whiskey session, and so they always found writing dialog to be second nature.

Finally, Marie gave Jones some advice that would help them finish the rest of their novel. “Don’t worry about it too much.” Marie said drunkenly. With that, Jones got to work. The next two days were filled with the recently uncharacteristic sound of the typewriter clacking from Jones’ bedroom. They finished the conversation. After a little bit of not worrying about it, they thought of a compromise between the two characters that they could write towards, instead of a bitter ending that they wanted to avoid at all costs. Knight Errand and Christian Campbell agreed to let the cosmic wave destroy planet Earth, as long as all of the resources that were being amassed to stop the wave were put to a rocket ship to send newborns to disparate inhabitable planets all across the known Universe.

When Jones finished the manuscript, they came bursting out of their bedroom with tears trickling down their face. They then revealed that they had several rolls of quarters left in their backpack, something meant to do laundry with, which became rather redundant seeing as there was a laundry machine within their new apartment. They took all of the money they had in the world and made several xeroxed copies of the manuscript and sent them off to publishers.

This was in the middle of the month.

Rent eventually came around again, at the first of the next month. With the next cycle of rent came another cycle of arguments between the two. Their arguments had even infiltrated the sacred weekly whiskey session.

“I hate to be this person,” Marie started, “but I think you should really consider getting a job. I’ve been paying rent with credit, Jones.”

“I’m sorry.” Jones said, swaying lazily back and forth. “I swear I can find somewhere else to go.”

“No, listen to me goddammit.” Marie stood up, running her fingers through her hair. “We got this nice apartment and this nice life and you can’t just bail on it. You can’t just bail on me. Without you, I won’t be able to pay rent anyway. I was perfectly fine wasting away in that drab apartment four floors up, but you just had to come into my life. You just had to tell me that I needed to play the piano again.”

“Would you have done it?” Jones asked. “Play the piano again, I mean.”

“Who cares?” Marie said, slumping down onto the futon that still smelled of stale cigarettes. “Who cares?”

“I’ll get a job.” Jones said. After they said this, they realized Marie had nodded off.

It was another two weeks and there was no word from any of the publishers that Jones had sent their manuscript off to.

One day, Mr. Ellison stopped by to see how everything was going. He was greeted by the rank smell of trash molding up around the island in the apartment’s kitchen. The blinds were closed and there was smoke coming from Jones’ bedroom. There were about six or seven butts in the ashtray that Jones emptied into the trash every night. Marie’s door was shut. Mr. Ellison kindly let himself out.

This is the part where I feel as though I should explain to you just a little more about Jones, to provide a frame through which to view his actions in a way that Marie cannot fully understand as of yet. Jones was not an only child like Marie was. Jones was born the child of a pastor, being raised with the idea that a dirty hippie would come back from the dead and make everything better eventually. They were also the youngest of six siblings, all born and bred American girls before them.

Jones’ father would still act as a minister during the war, and Jones in turn attended a good amount of funerals, not just the one of the kid they played with for fifteen minutes. Their mother moonlighted as a drunk, turning the television up loud and never ever ever turning it to the news. Jones learned from an early age to keep their mouth shut in times of crisis, is the point I’m trying to get at here.

As Marie spent the better part of a few days in her room, Jones took on the responsibility of feeding Regina the calico. They also took on the responsibility of cleaning up the kitchen, throwing away all of the moldy food that had accumulated over the first few months of the pair living in the apartment. When Marie finally came out of her room, the place was completely spotless and Jones was smoking a cigarette on the couch, reading from their electronic reader.

“Whatcha reading?” Marie asked.

“Something awfully sad.” Jones said. “Why don’t we go out for some coffee?” And so they went down to the diner on the corner of a numbered street and a non-numbered street, the diner where they had first met Mr. Ellison. This was the first time that they came to this diner in quite a long time, seeing as they could make their own subpar eggs and instant coffee from the comfort of their own apartment.

There was a silence between the pair, only interspersed with the ding of the front door opening. Each time the bell would ring, Jones would look around all paranoid, almost as if they were expecting someone to come in and shoot them in the back of the neck. They turned around spontaneously after one of these checks and looked Marie dead in the eye.

“I have one piece of good news, and two pieces of bad news. In what order would you like to hear them?” Jones asked.

“Bad news, good news, bad news.” Marie said.

“Ah, the classic bad news sandwich. I like the way you think.” Jones reached into their pocket and pulled out a red envelope labeled “Rejection Slips” in Magic Marker. They opened the envelope and like a Russian doll, seemingly hundreds of smaller envelopes came spilling onto the linoleum table that the pair sat at. Marie looked through each of them briefly. They were from every single publisher that Jones had sent their novel about superheroes to. Every single one, without a single publisher missing the memo.

“From all of them?” Marie asked with shock. “What did they say?”

“They all say the same thing.” Jones said, taking a drag off of their cigarette, “that ‘The Unbeatable Foe’ is a pile of trite garbage not worth publishing.”

“They really all said that it was trite garbage?”

“Not exactly. Some were nicer than others, but they always came back to that, even in a roundabout sort of way. That’s my first piece of bad news. Nobody, and I mean nobody wants to publish my writing.”

“This good news better make up for it.” Marie said, still staring at all of the rejection letters.

“The good news is that I got a job.” Jones said.

“You got a job? Where?”

“Here. I start tomorrow. I’ll be flipping burgers but I’ll be earning a little bit to keep the apartment for as long as we can.”

“Jones, you really don’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I do.” Jones said, fist to the table. “I have to because of all of the stress I’ve put you through since I got here. I’ve been nothing but trouble and it’s around time I sort myself out. I never should have come here in the first place, but I think I should at least try to help while I’m here.”

“While you’re here?” Marie chuckled a bit at this. “So you’re really taking up your promise of moving out?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. That’s where the second piece of bad news comes in.”

“What is it?”

“Marie, I have lung cancer.”