After the Applause: Jack and Skinjo Count the Cost

The last guest had left a fork standing in the cake.

Jack pulled it out and began clearing the table in the temporary Petra field room. Camera on the shelf, cups by the sink, unopened bottles under the table: each thing acquired a place as the celebration disappeared.

Skinjo held a paper plate beneath the lamp. A crescent of icing caught the light.

“Even the leftovers look expensive,” Jack said.

They had won permission to use the exhibition room for a month. The photographs and paintings could go up. The small celebration had been for that plain, necessary fact.

Skinjo scraped the icing into the bin.

“I wanted to feel happier.”

“You looked happy.”

“I was. That isn't quite the same thing.”

Jack folded a napkin around a broken piece of cake. There were too few containers; hosting had come down to this small engineering problem.

“The room is ours for a month,” he said. “That part happened.”

“And the money for keeping it open went into getting permission to open it.”

He stopped folding.

They had counted the fees before the guests arrived. Neither had mentioned the abandoned work, the paid jobs turned down to attend meetings, the hours borrowed from sleep. Those had seemed less like expenses because no one had sent an invoice.

Skinjo set the plate down. “I keep picturing the doors open and nobody behind the desk. Everyone back at work, earning back what it took.”

“A successful opening. Difficult opening hours.”

She did not smile. He put the cake parcel aside.

“Pyrrhic,” he said after a moment. “A victory that leaves you so depleted you can scarcely carry on. Not just a win you didn't enjoy.”

“So this qualifies?”

“I don't know yet.”

Skinjo looked at the pale rectangle where a serving dish had protected the table from crumbs.

“We got somewhere to put the work. People can actually stand in front of it. I don't want to pretend that's nothing.”

“It isn't.”

“But I was counting all the things we'd do once we won. Now I can't see how we do them.”

Jack rinsed two glasses, slowly enough that the water did not strike the bowls.

“We counted the room,” he said. “We didn't count what we'd have left to run it.”

There was no useful person to accuse. Each expense had arrived attached to a reasonable next step. They had taken the steps. The permission was real; so was the shortage.

Earlier, the applause had filled the room before either of them had needed to answer what came next. Now the refrigerator clicked off, and Jack could hear the fork settle against the sink.

“Do we still call it a win?” Skinjo asked.

“Yes. But not the whole result.”

She took a clean sheet of paper and wrote the exhibition's opening hours as they had proposed them. Jack sat down beside her. Together they began marking the hours they could actually cover.

The revised list was much shorter.

Neither reached for another bottle. Jack wrapped the remaining cake for tomorrow, and Skinjo left the crossed-out hours visible.