Free The Impossibly by Laird Hunt

One you just made.
    That’s right, one I just made, he said, then leaned over and gave me a little pat on the cheek.
    I say that was the way John found me, with a piece of onion stuck to my lip, and with the staples.
    Ouch! he said.
    Looking around at all the shelves.
    Then at me.
    As I had sat there, stapled, and I had apparently sat there, stapled, for two days, I had been thinking about, when it had been possible to think, those early days in the autumn when we would sit together at the café in the park. She had very nice hands, that’s what I thought. They were nice in their movement, which was unusually fluid and precise, and they were nice to look at and also to consider as they held up some object or other, of which there were, absurdly it now seems, so very many. Also there was her mouth, which was really just her mouth, but I had liked to watch it, desperately, as I had liked, strangely, to watch her shoulders, which she had held almost impossibly straight, like, I had always thought, some impressive individual in a painting, but just as likely, I had also thought, not.
    She came across the room toward me.
    She had come across the room toward me.
    The end.
    Sitting on the shelves, or perhaps I’ve already said this, were several of the objects we had collected in the country, as the world, even as it wrapped itself tighter and tighter around our throats, was made to seem to vanish.
    Was made to seem to vanish, I say to myself, pathetically.
    Actually, of what I thought, as I sat there, was nothing.
    Or not nothing.
    But not quite something either.
    Exquisite.
    The caged animals were now, after two days, all moving more slowly, if at all, and all of it, including me, now stunk.
    They’re done with you, Sport, said John.
    That’s it?
    That’s it.
    Where is she?
    Who?
    What do you mean, who?
    He shrugged.
    My tongue, at this point, was very swollen, and John suggested I not speak anymore, and for quite some time I couldn’t, so that was that, and now me alone in this fucking apartment, the end.
    It is not, however, quite the end with her, there is still this. As we were standing on the sidewalk in front of her apartment beside the rental car, just after she had insisted I not accompany her upstairs, she told me two things. The first was about a woman, once, very long ago, who had lived in the country and had done some very nice things and some things that were not so nice. The things that were not so nice had been done most recently, and had involved much weeping and sobbing and kneeling. There had been a man involved, a man of similar background—nice and not nice plus a little dumb, is how she put it. His involvement was, in fact, what all the weeping and sobbing and knees were about, somehow. Then the man was no longer in the picture.
    It was rather a long story to be told out there on the curb, and Deau had already gone breezing up into the building, or out shopping for dinner, my dinner, and John was waiting for me in the car so that we could return it to the agency before we were charged for another day. John did not, however, seem too impatient. So:
    The woman went into one of those buildings one goes into and knelt, as one does, and sobbed a little, according to custom, all the while talking up at the ceiling while looking down. Then the ceiling, which was quite unusual, she was told by everyone else in the building, talked back down at her.
    Here is what you must do, said the ceiling.
    Okay, the woman said.
    So she did those things, all successfully, then the ceiling reached down in a great flash of light and swept her up off the earth—the end.
    The other thing she said to me, just after we had kissed, was that, for what it was worth, she was sorry.
    For what? I said.
    Good-bye, she said.
    Actually she didn’t say any of that to me and the last thing I remember is swishing my hands around in the backseat of someone’s car.
    Quite effectively, in this instance, it would seem.
    Most stories have built