proximoception

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.