(no subject)

Being in plausible denial is worse. It requires premeditation.

If she wore skirts they'd wonder, pants and they'd regret. After that night it was pants for a week.

That mud. Everything that had happened was there. In frames, if you could talk about framing a sculpture. Reach out, grab an invisible leg and stop what had been if you can. The mud itself looked like it had tried, where the running had started. You felt like even gravity forgot itself and lunged.

Premeditation itself plausibly denied, maybe, and maybe so on, but a point is reached where some kind of something can't be.

In a way I couldn't have known him better. Play a person every week at chess like that and you learn what they'll push for. What they'll stop at. Not once did he beat me, and the better I knew him the less chance there was that he'd ever. He knew it, too, or some part of him did. At a certain point they read a book and you can tell. If it's a good book you may need to wake up a little. But his play never changed, at least not sensibly. So mine was all textbook, all classical, was not me at all, just what any of us would do. That shows you how little he knew about me. Probably just that I'd never not show up to play. Which it turns out was one thing too many.

I didn't pay you to do that. I suspect we'll both pay now you have.

Turn her back on the one she'd be shot, on the other and she'd give the game away, and on top of that there was no telling which one was which. So she kept looking in the mirror. She put her hands on it above and below as though to turn her life around. They stood there twenty minutes. She heard a passing fire siren and hissed, "Police!" They cleared out. She hadn't been sure those sound different in Norway, she told me. She'd made one last bet.

By letter! He rapidly wrote three notes and put them inside three separate envelopes addressed to himself. Now if they stopped him coming back he'd have his excuse. But going out? Yes, going out too. He'd bring each next day's out to post, then that day's back. The trick was to never once have empty hands. He wasn't the sort whose hands shook, but he was the sort to check. And they knew it.

I tried to love him like I'd loved her. They weren't really so different, in the end. But what it was was how everything is with me: I get just lucky enough to think I have more than luck, can go back to the well. I would have dropped my new life at the shipyard if I'd thought I was running on luck again. Lightning strikes any place twice, if you're patient, but with her it had struck oil.

Had it been tears, then? Who knew he had them in him. No. I stooped to sniff. Whiskey? The one I'd been saving. I reached for my gun.

A man had come in with a woman, a woman had left with two men. But which woman was me?

Only the house has a system, called being the house. If you ever get to thinking you're the house look down and count your legs. One saw a lot of sorry ways for a building to stand, in the war. But never on just two.

We were red so fast you'd think something had been added to us, not parts at once taken away, parts you'd think there'd be names for since we couldn't do without them. You'd think we'd have marked them out with dotted lines and had them specially armored, fuck the hecklers, let be the bemused. Beneath at least tattoos. We hadn't even gained the bullets, which were lost like the rest in the woods.

She winced at the shadow the wicker chair made on the wall. So many holes in one back. Hers would come through the phone.

I saw one stand on one. A gatehouse where you could no longer tell which side had been the courtyard. Its stilt was a sliver of stairwell, I think, though no certain stairs were left. You'd test if you were drunk by trying to let yourself walk beneath it. It had only not fallen from too much scope of choice. Like me in Rome, he'd kid me, having no real idea about Rome.

Plausible denial is the blood trail back to what you can't forget to stop forgetting.

(no subject)

The problem was solved with charm necklaces. You let people know just how much you already knew about what they might say by carrying readily-deciphered symbolic tokens. Convenience stores sell plastic ones, but of course there was a market for other sorts - precious versions, artful versions, strange. The token for conveying how well one understood the absurdity of those was a plastic watermelon with diamond seeds. Zircons, when bought on the corner.

A young woman I met last night understood everything about Greek poetry, anal sex and what makes most American males uncomfortable, and by grouping these three charms together prominently expressed her desire that I, that anyone, should consider these forms of knowingness overlapping, perhaps sourced in some defining episode of her past we might like to ask about when the time was right. She could tell by my face that I saw right through this, and I reached up to tweak my tokens of anger, shame and honor in appreciation of her ensuing gesture of handing me a token shaped like her head. I dropped it in the fountain by the corporate park, of course. She knew I would, I could see by the tiny charm at the base of her token's neck. One can't remember everyone.

Though I see you know that. My apologies. You know so many things that it's hard to locate what's relevant in time. Do you really know that many? One doesn't have to prove oneself before purchasing, of course. I can't swear all of mine are of equal valuation. Though one does feel one perhaps knows a bit of everything at my age. An age you can guess by the chain that weighs me down. This chain made of chains. The smaller charms added to qualify or nuance or undermine or reinforce others, and those doing the same to those - it is these that make one feel caught in one's own net, I think. Till some Sunday in a fit one goes and snips off all the small ones. Those that haven't been snagged by another's train when one was distracted. Or do you know this too? I seem to feel that once you did. No, please, I'd only throw it in the fountain. And please don't fear I'll give you mine. It is pleasant to feel off the clock, is it not? And to use so many words. From the pain inside my throat I can tell they're the first I've spoken in days. From the pain on its outside I gather my charms have become tangled hopelessly again. The worst thing's not the bleeding but when the offending piece gets healed inside the cut it made, pulling everything tangled with it closer in. More chafes, more cuts. More healings over. Till who knows what I know. Perhaps my body?

What's this? A dachshund halfway through a hoop? Caught there? And the hoop's his own back half? I don't know if I've earned this. No, keep that, it's yours. I'll see if I like how one looks on me the next time I stop at the corner.