Harold pressed his temples, feeling the taught little bundles of muscle under his skin pop side to side. His throat hurt, but not as though he had been coughing. It felt as though there was a little raft of phlegm hiding just behind and above his mouth, avoiding attempts at blowing it out his nose or just swallowing it. Fucking thing just wouldn’t move. He felt certain that if it did, it would likely fly out of his nose or mouth when he sneezed, probably in front of someone important. That doesn’t matter though, because it isn’t fucking moving now. He swallowed dryly again, and tried to ignore the dull ache of too little sleep behind his eyes.

Harold sat behind a desk in a library. The library was in a university, and the university was in Texas. The windows in front of his desk looked first down onto a little shitty parking lot full of leaves and grey north Texas mud and black Texas oil stains and second, up a little from the tree line beyond the parking lot, a noisy, pinkish-stone-colored highway overpass. He swallowed again. The fucking thing didn’t move. His fingers listlessly flipped the pages of a stack of books in front of him: ethics, politics. epistemology… none of them were interesting or indeed even readable for him past noon on any given weekday, and it was 9:00 pm on a Wednesday. He clicked back onto his laptop. Ten minutes later, he angrily closed his tabs, wishing it would sound like a violently slamming door when he did so. He swallowed again. The fucking thing didn’t move.

He began to ponder that little raft floating back there in his breath-eddy, and how it symbolized to him his semester: obviously something temporary, yet maddening in its immediate permanence. It appeared as immovable as those papers which he had been putting off, yet come finals week they would, at some discreet point, be a memory. He would breath deep again, but that was no consolation. The grey mud, the leaves, the black Texas oil stains, would all fade and he will breath deep again, but they are there now. The fucking things wouldn’t move. He would at some point understand something in the books in front of him or how to distance himself what haunted his browser, but they are as permanent—unmovable—to him as the ink he scrawled in library books—”fuck you,” “false,” “no!,” “does not follow.” He swallowed again. The fucking thing wouldn’t move.

What kind of God would imprison his subjects in this little world of spite-permanence? Spite-permanence—the hyphen carries what English can’t. Or, at least, that is what Harold would say if someone asked what he thought about it. People usually didn’t. But what does spite-permanence mean? The term sounded like how his temples felt as he massaged them, the first half receding dully into the second as the temporary slackness of the tightened muscle lent new annoyance to its returning tension. Spite sounds as it acts: quickly, with the character of un-deliberated and immediate action. Yet this is not spite: one cannot spite unless one knows the good against which one acts; one must understand the good of which one’s chosen evil is a diminution. Spite is a liar, playing the impulse while being the vice. Surely it is not pious to imagine God as spiteful, or to characterize our perspective on His providence an act of spite on his part. Nonetheless, when one is weary of the immediate it takes on the character of spite, refusing to move or change into the future or better. It is in its immediacy, its very lack of mediation by that which we desire—be it the good or the just or the healthful or simply the new—that we can see it as spite. The fucking thing doesn’t move, because it refuses the good which we wish it to become. But here Harold has undone his term and would look the fool if he was asked about it: spite-permanence is one of his acts of spite, since by his refusal to accept the immediate he is to God as the mud and the oil-stains and the phlegm are to him. God has willed he suffer the immediate. Who is he to quarrel with Him? Harold is the fucking thing that won’t move.

This last thought breaks his brown study, and Harold quickly stands from behind the library front desk and seizes the cart of books he must re-shelve. He is suddenly aware of his absurdity. What would a normal person think if they had heard him just now? The crushing weight of his egg-headedness, the unwieldy-ness of it, suddenly strikes his conscious self as comical, absurd. The normal man, the sane man, stands in front of the desk with a quizzical look, ready to make a joke at Harold’s, his own, or anyone else’s expense. Harold feels the need to put these thoughts away, back on the shelf, where that that healthy humor cannot crack his now-rotten egg and let the smell out till it, somehow, is not so noxious. Spite-permanence would be to let it fester, let it remain as immediate as it is now. Harold swallows, and the fucking thing moves.