She first acquiesced to an attempt on her life

She first acquiesced to an attempt on her life in the foggy quickness of happenstance. Each second and impulse weave out from the thread of a delicious, immaculate accident. Harmony with the nerves in her hairline, at a center without geography in her body apparent for the buzzing that gathers, registers into the suite of her movements with that of a man behind countless walls living toward his hand turning on the latch, the door pivoting out, the cart thrusting upward, the streamers in the atrium lurking in an arc of many days in transit but moving about her nonetheless revealing a locus in the waxen remains of her derriere thrust outward by the cart, given flight by the vague emergent cry or uninhibited gasp through the door as the man registered with the grace of his contribution and thought better of it, as she toppled toward the low, broad rail, her eyes falling already, wheeling away into rushing-past odors and empty voices floating upward in search of a crack in the glass roof, escaping still and stoic land for the air. Only, the gasp is cut and drawn back with all the foul atmosphere of the great hall now a vacuum in which he pinches a twist of her smock in his hand and wrenches her to the flaked up shingle of earth cast up in the throat of this building, carpeted, rain patters of maroon vermilion rings, stained with a blot of bleach cleanup at one annular bloom, faint shoe leather, faint clay, faint longing.

Though accident, once coalesced, the scenario is utterly contingent on every aspect, as if an ancient ritual of movement patterns and incantations of immemorially obscure efficacy beyond the rapture of its performance.


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