A fugue meant both ways

She was yelling at me what have you done and I kind of stared at her dumbly with blood on my hands not knowing really what I’d done but guessing it had to do with the blood. Sometimes I would forget things. Also I have a tendency to misplace my keys, but that isn’t relevant to what was going on right then.

I was the kind of person who told his stories slant or not at all. I liked to invest things with extra meaning, changing the truth, smoothing it over, making it more resonant to the cycles of my brain. The blood, the smeary fact of it on my shirt front, and of course I would have to be wearing a white short-sleeve button down on a day like this so I looked straight out of a major motion picture, told a story I didn’t much want to tell.

I quoted a joke from a tv show we both liked and smiled. She stared at me in frank-faced horror. I said I might take a shower. She said nothing. I said nothing. Then I took a shower.

What could I say? I woke up this way in an alley not knowing what had happened? I think I should go to the police? Have you seen that movie Teen Wolf, because it’s maybe kind of like that? That I am capable of many things that I don’t ever think about, and one of those might have happened today while you were at work? Any explanation would just be more unacceptability. I was standing in pink water sluicing off my body. That word. Sluice. It’s a good one, infrequently used but worth the trouble when it is.