Spittoon 4.1 Smith, Influence
16. The shadows move quickly and he doesn’t worry that Y can’t see them. 17. Y worries what would happen if she were to become pregnant. 18. In all of this X has remained a prolific lover. 19. Y wonders if the stress of pregnancy would make the situation worse, if he might attribute the pregnancy to something other than himself. 20. This is easy for Y to imagine. 21. She can think of the vocabulary he would use based on other fears he has described. 22. She has scattered the contents of the trash bin on the floor and still can’t find the ring. 23. X claims to have lost his ring too. 24. He claims things have disappeared around the house frequently since they moved in – significant things: his grandfather’s pocket knife, a watch his parents gave him for graduating college, a box of the letters Y wrote to him before they married, and now the wedding rings. 25. The letters turned up later, shredded to fuzz and scattered over the wet lawn. 26. Y was devastated and X hysterical. 27. “What next?” he shouted over and over. “What will it take to make you believe me?” 28. For a week after that scraps of the letters surfaced around the house, sentences in Y’s handwriting dissected and reassembled to spell out awful things. 29. Eventually the scraps ran out. 30. The last car on the parking lot is pulling away. 31. X follows it off the lot with his eyes, careful not to glance at the dark shapes convulsing at his periphery.
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