Swallowing
Coffee. Black. Because that's how all the great PIs drank it in my sepia imaginary. Like the darkness of the coffee had to meet, match the dark of the logic-bound soul. That antipathy toward all things sweet. Nothing in the eyes but that dark dark darkness.
"Of course, you know she didn't fall per se.”
His voice was dry and deep. To the point where an illness was inevitable.
Jones didn't drink coffee, but instead had ordered a large hot chocolate with many particulars. He had whip cream on his nose. Not literally, but in some truth, there it was.
That’s the kind of person he was. Or is.
Perhaps in a place closer to our reality, he wore clothes that were quieter. It memory, it serves us best to brighten things, spruce them up so that they can remain in our minds for longer. Maybe his suit was dark and his shirt blue, his tie a diamond-print maroon. But I can only remember his outfit as white slacks with a yellow t-shirt. The suit jacket draped over the back of his chair, the tie a purple and loosened.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido. It is so short, love, and so long, the forgetting. Oblivion is so long.
She wouldn't fall, of course. June, I mean.
I thought it but did not speak a syllable, though I had intended to say it aloud and to him, leaning forward and intimate. Instead, "oh" was all I said, more a sharp inhale than a word at all. I may have slumped back in my chair.
"They wouldn't believe me."
"Probably, they’d have just thought I was drunk or something. Maybe LSD."
"Which is kind of a pretty thought, because she was in the sky with diamonds, you see."
"She just stepped out and the clouds, they just took her away. Almost as if she were made out of paper. It was almost digital the way it happened."
"In any event, she didn't fall."
"She's still alive. Somewhere."
Which I knew. But still, it was so nice to hear.
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