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Thomas Walker squeezed his brother’s hand Martin did not squeeze back

VELOCITY MULTIPLIED BY DURATION

Sylvie’s Father ith theht a chicken froether, as a falances at him at the table She could see it now The chocolate hair The tallness Hannah fra it over the fireplace

Sylvie flushed her Spotless trousseaux down the toilet

She wasn’t angry You can’t get angry just because the world’s so er than you and you’re stuck in it That’s just the face of it, cookie A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculury She was silent Her life was Mrs Patterson’s life People lived in all kinds of raft cherry varieties and teach sohter J

apanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning Maybe She had time

It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying It was definitely all shit

On Sunday she went out to the garage again Vita-Pops and shadows Clark slipped in like light through a crack He had a canister of old war footage under his arreen stripes Nagasaki and Tokyo, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest The first retaliation Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles Clark reached out and held her hand She didn’t squeeze back The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up It looked like the inside of Sylvie

“This is my last visit,” Clark said “School year’s over” His voice sounded far away,“Car’s co a ride to Induction I think we get a free lunch”

Sylvie wanted to scream at him She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles

“I love you,” whispered Clark Baker

On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished

Sylvie rolled the reel back They watched it over and over A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen

Fade to black

And over the black, a cheerful fat :