Someone Randi had studied in school had argued that life is not an arc but available only in fragments.  Like mice darting from a wall panel into the next safe shadow, her prof had argued, life was “flicker,” never was met head on.  She recalled that she had done well on the exam covering the material.  Never much thought about the idea again, though . . . till some time later, when her own living—which is to say, her engagement and job and plans—came undone, jumped their tracks—comparisons she had used at the time.  She had “lost the plot,” a Brit friend summed.   

“Never saw it coming,” was all Randi could reply.

Struggling properly to grasp her experience, she bounced the flicker idea off her friends one day at lunch, though none of them immediately recognized it.  However, as one told her, “Ours is the twenty-first century and yours, a question search engines were born for.”  So Randi whipped out her phone, swiped in her query, and found what she was looking for: “Joe Conrad, as I live and breathe,” she laughed with her regular lunch bunch gathered around.  “Heart of darkness,” she sighed.  “If anyone would know, it would be Joe.”

“Sounds like a bumper sticker,” the Brit, still among her tightest friends, surmised.  “You should try to sell it online.”

“But no one would buy but readers,” Randi countered.  Everyone looked a bit downcast. 

The notion, though, stuck with her, and, thus, a year or so still later, once again gathered with her lunch friends, as they filed away from their table, walked toward the order counter at the deli they’d chosen for their ritual Friday meal, she wasn’t really “surprised” at what happened, she claimed, after. 

They deliberately had missed the big noon stampede.  But the four of them nonetheless had to take their places in the sequence of order-placers long enough to be able to watch the busy work of counter help.  Everyone in uniform looked totally consumed by her or his task, Randi registered: slicing meats and cheeses, cutting bread, replacing and topping steel bins of condiments, dashing back and forth from a kitchen that lurked behind the wall at the rear of the serving area  . . . “Must be exhausting,” she thought, then shared with her friends.

Quickly, though, her attention, centered on a bit of theater being played out near the cash register and to their collective right.  A cute young girl, maybe high school age, full-figured but giggly as if considerably younger in mind, was flirting quite openly with a young man some years her senior, mustached and proudly muscled and who seemed to be in charge of the heavier lifting behind the counter.  While Randi and her group watched, he made several trips to and from the kitchen, restocking shelves and countertop supplies, pausing at times to check his hair in his image reflected on the chromed back wall to the servers, or properly to adjust the folds in his shirt sleeves, Randi guessed, to showcase his biceps.  Every time he passed the girl, they had some kind of grinning exchange.  He would say something from behind, she would turn and offer him a slap on the arm . . . or one time, in passing, he tried to slip the same arm around her waist, which resulted in a howl of mock horror from the girl, then grinning again, and maybe even a bit of a blush.  Randi found the panoply of delight less than amusing, given her own experiences with coupling of late, yet nonetheless could not look away. 

“I mean, a blush!  These days?” she joked under her breath to her girlfriends.

“Old-style,” one of her bunch replied. 

Funny thing, too, as the boy made what was to be his last pass behind the girl, Randi had a sudden sinking in her stomach, “almost prescience,” she told the police, after, when they took notes regarding what she had seen.

This last time out, the boy approached more slowly than he had earlier.  He was darting his focus around, as if seeking the best position from which to launch his next flirtation.  After a couple of scans, his eyes settled on the counter ahead of the girl, where a long, narrow-bladed serrated knife was laid out, left behind when, at a customer’s insistence, the girl just had quartered a sub sandwich.  The blade, in fact, still gleamed with olive oil, the girl having been caught up in the customer’s additional demands and not having found the time to wipe it dry and return the knife to a rack above the back counter, where the implement previously had hung. 

The boy, for what ever reasons, honed right in on the knife. Stepping up behind the girl as if to embrace her as earlier; he then shot an arm around and grabbed the knife’s wooden and finger-gripped handle.  For just a flash of time—one of Conrad’s flickers, Randi decided, later— the scene froze.  But then, just as the boy was about to pull the claimed instrument away, the girl, maybe in panic at his position or in an impulse of flirty possessiveness, or as protection of her space and authority at the counter, reached out with one hand and grabbed the knife by its blade. 

Randi let out a shriek, then, as the boy reacted to the girl’s move—“What could he have been thinking?” Randi tortured her mind with the police—and quickly yanked the knife away.  And just for an instant, before what had happened could sink in, he bore the most amazing look of triumph.  He “beamed, as if he just had won the lottery,” she told officers.

Then, of course, chaos. “I mean, screams like could break your bones,” she added to her witnessing testimony.  “And blood, well, just everywhere.”

As if in a dance, the girl grabbed at her injured hand with her other, the man now draped around her.  Next, in a twirl they collapsed out of view as the crowd rushed forward.  “Call 9-11,” a couple people shouted.  “9-11!” 

Randi saw people pulling out phones.

Then on-lookers accumulated and pressed against the counter, almost climbing on one another to see.  But Randi instinctively pulled back.  New arrivals to the shop pressed by, muttering their reactions, as if in chorus: “Blood”  “Fingers”  “Oh, my gaaaawd . . .”  Yet she, in contrast, retreated till she reached the shop’s far wall, where she sank slowly onto her haunches, then to the floor, arms wrapping about her knees, fearing she hardly could breathe.

Laura, the Brit, ran to her aid, dropped to her own knees before her, and, just as the scene fogged and went blurry, was shaking her by the shoulders, demanding, “Randi . . . Randi . . . stay here!  Hold on.”  Just for a count, the scene disappeared, though, and then she found herself lying flat, the Brit pushing her small leather handbag under her neck for support.    “This is the way corpses are lined up in morgues,” Randi whispered up to her.  “I’ve seen it on cop shows.”

Laura turned and shouted for their group to come, and they did.  In a very short time, they had Randi sitting upright and were gathered around, everyone, to her mind, asking at once how she was . . . if she needed a doctor . . . something to drink.

“Just air,” she assured, and so they pulled her to standing and walked her outside, where they remained until the police arrived with parameds, and Randi had to offer her tale.

She must have “explained the same movie five times,” she told her new fiancé Tyler, after the girls had dropped her home, her friends having called their mutual supervisor at work to explain what had happened and that Randi probably was too “emotional” to come in for the afternoon . . . would be taking a “half sick-day.”  Tyler had rushed to their apartment after he, too, received a call.

He meant to “be there” for her, he explained, holding her in his arms, seated on the couch in their small living room area, opposite a large flat-screen television perched, between nature prints, on the opposite wall. 

“Just tell me what you need,” he assured.  “We don’t have to go out . . . we can stay in all weekend.”  He rocked her in his arms a bit, slowly, side to side, added, “You want a pizza?”

She said nothing, so he told her, “Baby girl . . . you don’t have to say anything more.  Just go where you need to go and stay there as long as you care to.”  A moment passed.  “I’ll be here when you get back,” he said.  “Never fear.”

She rocked quietly with him another moment or two, but then pushed free of his arms and slid a bit away on the couch, leaned forward with elbows on knees, head down, staring at the floor between her feet.

“You OK?” he asked, maybe bothered by the separation.

“Yeah, I’m fine” she replied.  “Just need a little space.”

A couple more beats passed.  She reached forward, picked up a cold, dripping bottle of beer he had set out for her on the low table before them . . . put it back down.

“It’s the craft IPA you like,” he instructed.  “I brought it special.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“Beer, it’s proof that . . .” he began.

“. . . God wants us to be happy,” she finished.  “Staff of life.  But Ben Franklin never said that.  And you’re an atheist.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he countered.  “Anything I believe is true.”

She raised her head, looked around the room, back at him, asked, “You ever wonder how close we can get to life?”

“Close?” he asked, sounding somewhere part way between support and worry she had gone off the deep end.  “Like, for example . . . ?”

“I mean touch it . . . know it . . . be in it,” she explained.

He sat quiet, stared at her down the couch.

“That girl today,” she went on, “I think she thought she was alive.”

Tyler looked confused, but nodded, continued to watch her every move.

“And how did she know?” she asked the air in front of them.

Tyler shook his head, side to side.

“She knew,” Randi continued, “because Muscle Boy was paying attention.”

“The guy was a creep,” Tyler judged. “Fonzi meets Dracula, from the gym.”

“Exactly wrong,” she countered, firmly.  “That girl probably dreamed at night of finally wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, making the right moves, that someone like him would pay attention.  He was her what . . . I dunno . . . her angel?”

“Well maybe so,” the man answered, “but not the angel she really wanted.  This one took a couple fingers as a toll.”  He chuckled under his breath.  “Bad angel, right?”

Randi paused again, said, “There’s always a toll.”

Tyler once more looked confused, maybe worried.

“Really,” she told him.  “You used to walk by my desk a couple times a day, just to attract my attention.  I wasn’t supposed to realize, but I was supposed to notice.”

“That’s just courtship,” he told her.

“Sure . . . old as dirt,” he added.  “You can watch birds doing it in the yard . . . the males huffing and spreading their wings.  Saturday Night Fever . . . in the grass.

“So,” she asked, then, “you get the response you wanted?  Or not?  You pay a cost?”

“Well, I bought a few new shirts . . . some concert tickets . . . a few plates of food,” he told her, after a brief tabulation.  “Cost me a few bucks.  But worth it.  A calculated risk.  We’re here, right?”

“But you paid,” she replied. 

Tyler got up, walked to the window at the far side of the room.  He looked out for a few moments, then turned, strode across her vision and sat in a chair directly in front of her and to one side of the television.  “And your point is?” he asked.

“We all pay,” she said.  “The girl just paid in fingers . . . it’s an ancient currency.  Smaller denominations—all singles.”

“And you paid a toll, might I ask?” he said.

“Obviously.”

“Well, I would disagree.  Your hands look fine, especially that left one with the rock on it,” he told her, his tone shifting into a darker range.

She lifted the hand in question, wiggled the ring in the late-afternoon light.  She knew, because he told her, that the ring had cost him more than the traditional one-month’s salary.  “Truly,” she told him, “but it has weight, you know?”

“Weight, as in loss . . . as in toll?” Tyler asked her.

She merely nodded.

“Do tell,” the man continued, his voice now in a steady, mechanical pace, as if reciting a script.

She did not immediately answer, but finally explained, as she eased back into the couch, “I want to feel alive . . . like that girl this morning, before she lost her grip.”

“Bad pun,” he advised.

“An accident,” she shot back.  “As was her loss, yet just for a moment . . . I don’t know if you even can imagine . . . she was the center, you understand?  She’d reached for and grabbed a desire.  I could see it on her face.  She had value and was worth pursuing.  But grabbing that significance was dangerous, too.”

Tyler just stared.

“Then, somehow,” she told him, “you know, she what . . . she faced the bull one pass too many, and all the cape flourish in the world could not save her.  She acted instinctively . . . and I think that was what she really was grabbing, Ty.  She was holding on to that moment of worth.”

“She was stupid,” he answered.  “And I don’t say that to be cruel, or to mansplain,” he added.  “We are free agents, my love.  Nobody is in charge.  We take care of ourselves.  Any value we have, we earn.  Simple as that . . . the girl maybe did reach to hold on to something, but was not thinking, and yes, she paid.  So be it.”

“But it’s not about thinking, Ty,” Randi told him.  “It’s about, I don’t know properly . . . it’s about what I said before, seeing a moment and grabbing it, keeping it.”

“Her moment had edges,” Tyler said.  “They all do.  The edge is time . . . it’s like a saw, babe, always cutting itself free.  That girl didn’t know enough to be safe, that’s all.   As that rich guy said in one of your chick flicks a couple weeks back, ‘We’re sorry for it.’”

“But imagine,” she pled with him, “how small that girl’s vision was, how her life had focused her down on just grabbing one thing before it slipped away.  Imagine her horror, one second later!”

The man sat, shook his head, reached over and took a swallow from the beer, replaced the bottle in its wet circle on the table top.

“’S getting warm,” he informed.  “Shouldn’t let it go to waste.”

She took a swallow of her own.

“I think I know what this really is about,” he added.

She looked up, met his glare.

“You’re really worried about us.  Right?  You want to grab a moment?  OK.  Sure.  Think about what’s happening here.”

She watched him as if he were far away.

“You are worried about us,” he repeated.  “About commitment.  About how your last engagement went south.  About whether or not you can trust me . . . and, I suppose, about whether you are going to get something you need from all this . . . from the loss of freedom.”

She listened.

“Well, I can’t tell you,” he summed.  “To be honest, babe, I am not sure I know what you really want.  You want to be chased, like that girl?  Or you want to be safe, with me, with someone who is level-headed and will have rocking-chair money put aside when the time comes?”

“I want to feel it,” she told him, her voice quavering just a bit.

“Feel what?!” he demanded, now seeming to give in to anger.

Randi did not answer.  Instead, she stood up and slowly walked around the table and into the small kitchen area of the apartment.  Tyler could not see, but heard her jerk a drawer open, then slam it shut.  After which, she reappeared and settled into the couch.  In her hand, he now noticed, was a long thin knife they had bought online to peel the skin from fish.  He was a lover of salmon, baked on a plank, with lemons and herbs, and they had watched a cooking show to learn to remove the skin of such fare smoothly and without damaging the cooked muscle tissue of the fillets.   When the knife’s swift, sharp edge was demonstrated, everyone in the audience of the show had said “Awww,”

As earlier, she raised her eyes slowly and held them level till she knew she had his attention.  After which, she placed the knife down on the table between them and turned it so the blade was pointed her direction.  Then she leaned back again.

A beat passed.  Then, “Grab the handle,” she said.

At first he didn’t move.  

“Grab the damned handle,” she demanded.

He watched her carefully, then, caught in her voice, did so.

Another beat . . .

She leaned forward to seize her prize.