Thousand: Six Hundred Fifty

beginning.” She gropes on. Any moment she will feel the door frame, she will bruise her hip on the doorknob. “Every time, every time, every time,” she sings, forgetting the words. This goes on a long time. The girl thinks about turning around and going back but more as a story to tell herself, like the shipwrecked sailor clinging to the spar, kicking toward the island last seen from the burning deck but which might even now be falling away to the south and the swimmer’s tired legs pushing toward open sea. Suppose I could turn back, suppose I imagined