Sissel's on his side. The cat, the cat he means, the cat he named stupidly the same as her, it makes thinking things through too messy and jumbled. Sissel Sissel Sissel. Should have just named it Shadow or something that cliche. Anyway. Sissel's on his side, and a good thing too, the way time's treated that cat has been so good. Or bad. Bad in the first place. All too bad, all too wrecked, a timeline or two ago organized like a torn-up spiderweb. Time's treated Sissel like a friend, anyway. The way anyone would get treated after their third date. Sissel's one of those cat clocks with the swinging pendulum tails, tick tock.
Anyway. Anyway.
Sissel's on his side, and a good thing too, because they're funhouse mirror images of one another and he needs that cat. The way you need your frontal lobe, you know. He needs that cat like that cat doesn't need him but when he bends down and gets his fingers down the length of Sissel's fur and says in soft hospital tones that hey he needs a favor Sissel still perks his ears up tall. Even after this many times.
They're learning things. Learning things. Learning things about how hands sweep the circle of a clock and how if you unbraid time you still have the same amount of strings. Sissel curls up — the cat, that is — Sissel curls up on his knees when he gets to thinking about it, planning the next knot out, flicks his tail all tick and tock, and it helps him think things through. They're learning things with a couple times' experience that fills up the same space, things about how time works and how it sets itself straight. How you still have the same amount of material and the same amount of space from beginning to end and you can only bend it slightly different ways so it reaches both sides.
God his head hurts. Not really.
It's tacky. It's cheesy and cliche and science fiction movie and that's what they're finding out, that it's true to life. Found it out the first time when Sissel — the person this time, dark hair all the same but no fur — kept on living past that moment she didn't the first time around and there was this jolt down the cat's spine. Weird. Nothing. Weird. It's nothing.
(It was something.) It was something in the way that blood spit up into her hands was something, the way her shaky limbs and shakier breath was something. Sissel the person, she went down before he even came home from that prison. Dead in a hospital he couldn't visit.
It happened twice before he and the cat figured you can't undo that kind of tear in — in what, time, progress, something, something. You kill something and something has to die. You rip a hole in a sheet of paper and you can't just take it back. (It's all more obvious when he waits one time and he hears about how isn't it sad, that detective girl was so young, saved her mentor like that and if only his wife had made it.) He unknotted it all and he said to himself, this is how it's going to be, and he waited for that tick and tock.
He said to himself this is it and time tipped over and Sissel, Sissel the person, the one with long dark hair and the eyes that smiled at him and he didn't deserve it at all, kept living. No problems.
Sissel's on his side. The cat. Sissel's on his side. He hasn't told Sissel what he's going to do but the cat will understand, the cat's smart and all. He waits for the metal click of the prison bars opening, waits for Sissel-the-person to wrap her arms tight around his chest and tuck her face into him and breathe and oh it'll be hard but he has to, he can't take this back. She kisses him and he says just one day more. I promise you, just one day.
He takes two days and it's like time's tapping its fingers impatient because she gets close calls, Sissel the person does, she drops a kitchen knife with a clatter at her feet and she gets her scarf caught on a stray nail in the wall once and he gets the picture, okay, back off. Time's like a scowl torn into the stars all messy with space. He listens close. He goes upstairs, goes through his drawer and there it is, right where he left it, she never did go through his things she was too trusting and she never should have been should she. He goes in the bathroom because it's easiest to clean and he doesn't want it to be worse on her than it should.
Click click. Tick tock.
She stumbles over her own feet because the bathroom door's wide open. There's him with the cool mouth of a gun up against his temple and he's planning on bleeding the same color as his suit, she'll never like red again, huh. Sissel, dark hair in her eyes, dark eyelashes trembling, says, what are you doing, sweetheart, put that down and he shakes his head. Goes to talk and his mouth is dry and the clock in here is ticking so loud, has it always been this loud, loud in solid tangible echoes beating out against his head. Tries again. Sorry, Sissel, he says.
I missed you, Sissel, he says. I missed you.
You'll miss me, Sissel, he says, and she's so so close that with the bang he barely catches the splatter of blood on her gaping mouth.
Saved her.