He was supposed to take two weeks off. Nearly a year later, his wife still thinks he goes to work. Every morning, a thirty-two-year-old husband and father gets dressed, picks up his laptop bag and leaves the house as if he is still the dependable engineer he used to be. His old manager keeps offering him a way back. His family still trusts him. His career is damaged, but not destroyed. The door has been open the entire time. He just keeps telling himself he will walk through it on Monday. Instead, his days have become a collection of exits: secret accounts, hotel rooms, dating profiles, strangers, an affair with a twenty-two-year-old woman who believes he is still an engineer, and eventually a temporary job inside a foam shark at a shopping centre. Aloha! Then, during one Saturday shift, his wife and two young daughters approach the shark. They don't recognise him. Neither does his lover. By the end of the night, he is sitting alone in a supermarket car park outside Swindon with a cold coffee, a declined credit card, an unanswered email from the manager who still hasn't quite given up on him, and two messages glowing on his phone. One asks him to come home. One offers another escape. And Monday is still two days away. Aloha is an experimental, sexually explicit verse novella about anxiety, infidelity, masculinity, fatherhood, avoidance and the frightening distance between knowing exactly what you need to do and actually doing it. Darkly funny, uncomfortable and increasingly claustrophobic, it follows a man who can calculate almost anything except how long he can continue postponing his own life. Sometimes nothing traps you. Sometimes every exit is still open.
