Section 0014

     “It seems to me we have much the same problem here.” It would begin with Mr. defending the little girl, and then as the neighbors listened old wounds opened like complicated flowers in the night.
     “Yes” I replied while continuing to slay this three-headed dog that kept pestering me.

     (In my eyes I saw the beast’s eyes
     filled with death, like fluorescent lights).

     It is a voice to be reckoned with - so close to dream (and nightmare), so near to the music we hear when a secret slips into the air, so scalding, yet tender.

     This is my last happy memory of my fiancée.

     So love was mistaken identity. I rediscovered the empathetic role of silence: it allowed her to be in a frenzy, did not respond to her magical conviction that she could kill me, stifled my tendency to interpret in order to “clair-ify” Claire, and kept me quiet even more than usual.

     Jacob imagines he can hear a harpsichord. I step down into the garage and she spits.



     These words anticipate in an uncanny way the turn writing would take in the twenty-first century, now that the Internet has made copyists, recyclers, transcribers, collators, and reframers of us all.

     There is a sort of not-yetness between us, I tell myself.
     She did not, could not, answer. The little shift fell open all the way down, revealing an exquisitely full young body. The moonlight fell gently on her face, molding it, and she had a wistfulness about her. So cold, so far away.