TRICK SHOT

We were fighting and I was losing. I knew the feeling of losing. You feel your own interest in yourself starting to wane. I didn't like it. I told her — I don't like how you're making me feel about this. You — you remind me of — and I searched through my memories for a relevant analog, and I thought back to when I'd been sitting on the couch looking at my phone earlier, and I said to her — I feel like the plastic water bottle with the red hot iron ball on top of it. My cap has caught fire and now I have this thing tearing through me destructively. Oh, she said — you feel destroyed inside? That's how you feel? I said yes. I watched her search through her memories for a relevant analog. Well, I feel unsatisfied, she said, I feel carelessly thwarted, I feel like the dermatology hobbyist squeezing the pus from the cyst but failing to fully remove the sac at the end. I said, what — a cyst? Disgusting. She crossed her arms. I don't know how to give you what you want, I went on, you're like the rug before it's been shampooed and pressure washed — opaque and unfathomable. I want to see your design, but I can't. She sighed. OK, she said — I'll tell you what I need — I need you to be the like the woman falling backwards from the cliff, holding the pair of scissors — not the woman, or the scissors, or what she's backing away from, or the crumbling precipice, or the branch that snags her clothes on the way down that she tries and fails to grab, or the leaves that cling to the cotton, or her fingers that miss the branch, or the hammock that she lands in safely — not those, but the cup that the scissors fall into perfectly by her side, point down, perfect, a trick shot. I said OK, because I was tired of losing. She said, you've seen that one? I wanted to be the cup, so I said yep. I get that one all the time, I said to her. It's famous.