Stories by Eve Tushnet

YOU/SHE: Mandatory Minimum Sentence

That first time, when we met in the green-marbled anteroom of the Social Ministry, she was standing just behind you (heeling, I thought--I was full of myself then and have had ample time to reassess her), blond on blonde, watching as I struggled through courteous conversation with my social betters, watching, as I slid much too fast into something I didn't fully understand, while I didn't know where to look, down and then into your eyes and then very quickly away, while her thin pale lips pressed together and then slowly shaped into a smile as she tilted her head; I guessed even then that she would marry you (though she will never be as close to you as I was once), and I still wonder whether she guessed even then that I would come to betray all the beneficial calculations of the Social Ministry, because really, you know, I should have been grateful--poor boy made good--but instead I spent nights pacing your house, where you'd so generously let me stay, hating my job and looking in mirrors to see if my skull had begun to show beneath my skin--because oh, I know, even my repentance is vanity, so that even now what I remember and what I regret or resent (variably depending on the weather) is not the murders or the children taken from their parents but the vision I see when I close my eyes: your hands, my friend, against her skin and tangled in her white-blonde hair.