on remakes, chow yun fat, and the phantom hourglass

Fight

She was holding my hand when he lunged over the bar. There was a bottle in his hands. He brought it up in an arc and it exploded into a flower of glass and peeled label. Then he stumbled, fell. His head smashed into a cupboard and he curled up. Someone threw ice at him from across the counter. I never saw who he was fighting.

She saw me watching, squeezed my hand.

"Don't worry about it," she said, then brought her arms up around my neck, kissed me on the cheek. I could smell alcohol, perfume.

Before I left a woman climbed onto that same counter, tried to step between the glass and the dark wet spots. She wrapped her hands around a steel pipe that ran the length of the wall, danced alone, lilted and fragile like a scarecrow.

RCMP-OUT

Some fiction, as a holdover.

--

He spilled the wooden tiles onto the table.

"We'll play double solitaire," he said.

She looked up from the grid. "How do you play that?"

"You work with you got, and I work with what I got. We don't score off each other, but if you need a letter--say a 'y', like in 'sympathy'--then all you need to do is ask."

She pulled some tiles over to her side and sighed. "And what if I spell 'love'?"

"Then you win the game."

She filed the little wooden blocks onto the tray in front of her and stared at them for a moment.

"H-A-R-K-N-E-R," she said aloud. "Guess I keep looking."