She ran to the toilet, and upon her return she said, What a dinner! Now where were we? and he didn’t want to go back to where they had been.

He prepared their dinner with a kind of artless poetry. The boring rhyming kind. Your food tastes like a greeting card, she said. He beamed.

The car went through the guardrail and over the cliff. The police chief said, That’ll learn them. And he was right. It was a very high cliff

Phil Collins is the soundtrack of the empty theater, he says and he waits for her reaction and when she punches his arm he says, I love you.

The mistakes that were made. The laughter forgotten. The cuts and the scrapes. The enduring pain. The stranger beside him. That eighth shot.