Our protagonist Cathal is a quietly vile man: someone who places value on his own lazy behavior, and is complicit or willingly blind to his upbringing and learned patterns of selfishness, cruelty, and misogyny. I just spent a week in Ireland, and while I was waiting for a bus down south to Glendalough, I noticed a man across the street and up a window, seemingly exhausted at his desk job. That image seemed trivial - until I read this. Short as this story is, I felt vividly transported right back to that afternoon. It's much the same bus ride Cathal takes, the same stops, roads, and farms in Wicklow County. It was as if I was sitting behind him on the bus and watching firsthand as he crumples from smalltalk with a woman, wastes away at his place in the countryside, eats away a woman's time and earnest attempt at love. Ireland has so much beauty, and I did catch myself wondering how locals may have felt about their country beyond the beauty, when even their men could be complacent in ugly rituals of poor upbringing or by drab patriarchal life. This tiny story met me exactly halfway.