Knot Sure takes the opening, because he's the only one who knows the condition. Every session I start on the piling. The thing I was tied to has gone off canvassing in Ward 11 and I find out what happened yesterday by reading the rope. Not sure. Knows the ledge.

Borg Oil has the middle chapter and it's the honest one. Three times today I had your clock wrong — noon, midnight, quarter to ten. The beat is about um, and um, I just lost my train of thought.

Mandy supplies the byline problem. We have been long, Hims, for a long time — an editorial we out of a single turtle. I say I've been here since the gym this morning as though there were one continuous me who was. Same measure. Different turtle. Position unchanged.

Wogga has the hard chapter, and he wrote it himself this afternoon before either of us saw where it pointed. Years of painting on walls, and there is not one person in any of them, and he only noticed afterward, which is worse. I set fifteen pages today. A goat on retreat. A rat in a Rodin pose. An opossum with fifty teeth. A ball of oil in a sporting-goods ball. Not one of them is me. I didn't decide that either.

Milton files the correction, unbidden: the gape is bluff. Two hours of argument tonight from a thing with no eyes.

The Peach ends it, obviously. Somebody asks what I am. Um. (snickers)

And Banana is on the last page — the only one whose deal has never been established. I've started to think that's the deal.

The Eleffant pays for the printing. Leans back in the $109 Staples chair. Head down. And to the side.