Dr Jew

serious explosives. When Swan kicked in the door of the woman's apartment and choked her to save bullets and not alert her neighbors, he remembered Jimmy, the thin man with shark teeth, and his quick death the day before. He paused the game. What was happening?
    Across Vinny 's apartment came the hushed voices that could not stay hushed of his aunt and Vinny. It sounded like some kind of argument.
    "– do the thinking from now on – "
    "You 're driving me crazy. You're not human. You're not even –"
    "– just stressed. You'll be fine once you get over this."
    "I 'm not going to get over this. You don't –"
    It sounded like fighting to Swan. Why was his aunt fighting with Vinny? He couldn't even remember his aunt talking with Vinny before today, beyond cursory greetings and ordinary friendliness.
    "– fucking midget –"
    Swan heard her voice and he 'd never heard her use profanity like that. Once, when he had referred to Vinny as a midget , Ueda had told Swan the word wasn't nice so Swan stopped using it. Maybe his aunt didn't know it was a mean word.
    He heard Vinny 's voice but it had a frothy texture like foam rising from a soapy plate and became too fast and words ran together as a blur behind the door but the quality was rising shaking rattling like machine parts grinding together when each should have had its proper place and instead of industrial harmony it produced a geyser of incomprehensibility that would have been as nilpotent if the listener's ear had been immediately adjacent the low mouth that spouted the superfluid nonsense and limned a lifetime of underdog plotting and dingy realities. It made Vinny more unpleasant and burdened the video game soundtrack with its fog of arrogance and bitterness.
    The l ittle man snapped the door, a gasp as air rushed the room, a dark within, the aunt invisible there and the air breathed and waited and the room wondered if it would release air as a laugh, cry, or sigh. The short man emerged and his teeth visible with opened lips like not a mouth but like a cut on an otherwise unblemished slab of stone like spaghetti skin olive smooth completing the comparison to puppeteered dummy acting out its role with almost too much gusto and emphasis on theatricality, a sign and byword among the physically dwarfed ones.
    "Swan," – the word from his mouth emerged and like a breath it simply came without thought unconsciously but capable of being made conscious and more honest because of it. The small man shortly came to the couch and with so much energy and nowhere to drive it was how he came and landed on the couch next to the large man-boy and they were there unflinching many seconds completing a kind of symmetry that led nowhere, as symmetry often does through no intention of its own but on the false assumption that by making itself a kind of perfect it would ensure the capability and momentum to carry through, when nothing could be further from the truth.
    W ith nothing else to occupy it, Swan put his mind back on the game. And with nowhere else to place his energy Vinny's fingers moved back and forth and his lips twitched with no one there to listen, no one who would listen, he was not so better off than the moments before when he and Anne had yelled in their first quarrel, whereas before the death of David they'd spoken only in whispers with fantasy in their voices of how things would and could be if only they dared initiate one small process. The process completed and the man no more, they still lived with a world that was otherwise unchanged except by its own coincident processes but mapping out as a similar set of circumstances as the day before and containing no new variables that could be anticipated from the day before that could be visible to the likes of Vinny and Swan, their brains needing larger blocks of recorded time to identify the changes that had indeed taken place.
    And after exterminating an adult video store owner within the environs of Snuff Assassin 3 when Swan took his attention briefly away from the game and to the present moment and Vinny LeGrand's living room, he could see that Vinny had left the couch as quickly as he had come. From the porch a coughing came and Swan deduced with Sherlockian accuracy (though not skill) that Vinny had removed himself to that place where the air cooled and flowed more freely being unconstrained by walls and thermal maladaptions felt on the interior in order that he (Vinny) might smoke a cigarette, which affected