I want the one robe in her collection of numbered jerseys and jodhpurs. I do my best karate kick, screech, temple my hands together, bow. But she delivers a figure-skating costume, bangles glaring like her stopped watch face in which I also float. I try to halve a board with my bare hand. She shakes her pretty head, earrings knelling No use.
Nobody knows the business better.
She's done it forever. The night after our first fight, black planes drop paratroopers onto a field of ruins I must vault and scale to find you, to find everyone, to warn you all the world, at last, is done with. The closer the skydivers get, the smaller. They land in our hands, toy soldiers in chintzy chutes creased like new Christmas shirts. Don't forget the 16th.