4.10

Poor Mary. Your fingernail bent back on the doorjamb as you went to grab the handle. Such an innocent mistake, of course, but it's how your soul felt, too, when you went to grab onto me. Like a fingernail, bent back on an obtrusive edge that was so innocuous you had thought it was invisible.
Maybe it's too bad I'm not rounded and smooth, but at the same time: everyone has doorjambs. It's the getting inside a person's head that's supposed to be treacherous. I guess it's just too bad you didn't use the doorbell.
- Theodore

4.9

Cori slipped her hand deftly into her bag. There wasn't anything in there. All the care she had put into packing her bag was undone. Luckily, the door was unlocked and all her things were still on the table in the entryway. She picked them up and placed them carefully into her bag again: toothpaste, moist towlettes, lipstick, credit cards, cash, two small figures of the buddha, phone, key. She walked out the door and onto the street. There he was again, looking at her. She slipped her hand deftly into her bag. There wasn't anything there. She thought about waking up, but luckily, the door was unlocked and all her things were still on the table in the entryway.

4.8

Professionally, Jay was an artist. Privately, he was a failure. There were images he saw in his brain that he wanted, desperately, to make. He scraped and crafted and ground and wiped and slid hot dry rough young cracking ugly portraits around his workshop to find the right light so he could see the layers of old paint flake off when he [turned] them to ribbons with a box cutter.
And at the end of every month, Jay would lay, splayed out quietly on the floor as seven or eight rich idiots would roll by with his agent to purchase the long strips of heavy canvas tacked to creaking stretchers. His agent would leave a check, and he would use the bulk of it to buy more paint.

4.4

[It's Watson's birthday today]

He was already sweating, and the sweat bit at the corners of his eyes. His hands, sunk up to the elbow in the membranes above him, were too grease-grimed to be of any help. The delicate operations he was trying to enact (beyond the power of sight) in the complex guts of the machine (well-designed to be inaccessible and incomprehensible by people long-lost to time itself) put more than just physical strain on the bones and sinews of his aching fingers. His mind began to pirouette, turn backflips, fade from control. That shape octagonal, this one cylindrical, a thread here, a sprocket there, and over all a repulsive gelatinous lining of icy lubricant.
He turned to the young idiot standing next to him, insensible to the fear of failure, confident in his skill and the inevitability of success, and said "Wrench, please."
He got the wrench and drove it up into the layers of sheeting under the hulk. Averting his eyes (it's almost impossible to lie with one's eyes), he tapped the wrench four times against the cleanest section of dull-tympanic crust he could manage.
"Wow, it's really up in there, isn't it?"
"Yeah. I've almost got it, though." He thought about throwing the part very far away, preferably over a cliff into a dark bay somewhere. He drew the wrench back out and closed his eyes as the lie washed over him once more. "Wrong size."
"Smaller or–?"
"Sure."