What Resolution Prevails

[Clyde]

Gamble?s fingers stretched and the tips curled up and made each long digit unnaturally concave. Several warm cracks snapped free of flesh before the man toed-in his fingertips and made each hand a fist. Clyde was no stranger to his partner?s agitations; familiar with both the causes and tells; but appeared strangely resilient in the face of Gamble?s stirring rage. Clyde didn?t take his eyes from Gamble?s, and Gamble?s too did not retreat. Only did Clyde move his hands, taking them up and into the breeches of his coat to again amass at his hips.
   
?I think I?m through,? Gamble said. ?Just about through, yeah, with you, Clyde Morris. I think that it?s best that you runalong.?
   
Clyde, a tall and fierce petrification, edifice of an uncertain and ambiguous victory, a genesis of pretentious unfaltering, looked back at Gamble and did not speak. His mouth stayed straight, his yellowy eyes, quiet and small, were straight. When he moved it was only his fingers, those of his right hand, and they crawled, slow and misstepped and impulsively and as wretchedly metered as spiderlegs, towards the pommel of the .45 buried in his beltline.
   
?Haw!? Gamble hollered in excitement. He?d seen the motion, seen those little spiderfingers crawl. He sided his body with a quick turn, a quick step, swung it so that his broad torso no longer faced Clyde and that his skinny hips, less the target, did instead. In rear, tucked into his belt was the curly old trunk of that antique six-cylinder revolver. It?s pommel was rightfaced, acceptable by the right hand in this sided posture.

And Clyde hadn?t made for his gun, but Gamble?s hurry made a hurry of him. Clyde?s eyes crack, separate from the comfortable mysticism silence, a gruff, stringent mouth and a gun award, and panic; they crack. Nostrils flare, his bottom lip leans down as if to release a holler in pain from the ghost of a bullet presaged by Gamble?s gunstance. He?s tricked by his friend?s stance and thrown into defense before the introduction of an honest, tangible offense: fooled by the noise Gamble had cheered, fooled by his siding, and, ultimately and completely, fooled by the varnish on the trunk of his revolver.

[Clyde]

It was just after six in the morning when Anya first awoke in her bed. Her room was large and sported the affinities of a woman not yet a woman. It did not harbor fleets of stuffed animal or depictions of flowers stenciled into the wall: instead it was run around with flat, perfect, glossy posters pristine by way of her appreciation for them. Just inside the door to the left was a large, whitewood, multitierd, multislotted entertainment center bludgeoned and filled to capacity with devices. The television was large, but bulky and archaic which, with showings of wealth: the size of the room, the royal stating and shape and design of the long, intricately framed windows overlooking a rich and royally colored lawn; was an evidence of rare usage.

The girl slipped out of bed and worked out the sleep in her body. She was thin and moderately lengthed at half-past five-foot, blonde and eyed blue. Her face was triangularchinned and pretty and well conditioned when made up: at nineteen she had yet to shed the the reddened coats of pimplebed splashed out atop her tenderly boned cheeks: conditioned when made-up.

On her nightstand was a cellular tethered to the outlet behind her bed by a long, slender white cord. She clicked the screen to life, fingered through the messages, updates, statuses, through the fingertipslashing grandeur of the appreciation for her life through keystrokes, fingerstrokes, likes: the pallid and lonely majesty of squatting above a kingdom laid out upon stones of shallow photos and chivalries conducive to the reply of sister kingdoms: the necessity of a flourishing kingdom---the acknowledgement of another.

Anya scooped up the phone and took it with her into the bathroom behind the door on the rightward wall in her own room. She scrubbed, layered, prepared, emptied and finally showered. She emerged from the room with a towel whirled around her head and in clean black sweatpants and a white tank that was thin enough to allow the lime green bra she wore beneath to squeak through the translucent fabric. She snapped on the television to fill the room with sound as she laid, bellydown, legs curled back and kicking idly, with all of her attentions paid to the little rectangle touchscreen laid out on the bedspread like the little transuniversal window it was, sewn straight into the comforter. Thirty minutes burned away; Anya checked her hair, then, content with the soft and workable moisture lightly dampening, slid off the bed and crossed into the hall.

[Clyde]

The upstairs area of the Krist home was grand and royal and egregiously spacious. When outside Anya?s door, one is sat right onto the cool, smooth rosewood runnings of the floorboards in the hall, which was wide and tall. The walls were brown and hearty and smooth of upstraight planks, perfect and ascending with almost-symmetry throughout the corridor. The walls were adorned meagerly. Directly right of Anya?s room the hall lead ten yards then splitoff into a T. Directly in the centerwall between the splitting halls hung an ornately-framed portrait of a square-and-hardfaced man in a grey suit. His hair was slicked back, his eyes were small and profound and blue, his nose long and triangular like a sail, his mouth tiny and unemotive.

Anya turned left towards the stairs. The banister, downwardmoving, was shiny and curled down like an unslacked pigstail of rosewood. The downstairs hall was circular, wide, grandiose. It was an ornamental space and entrance both: luxuriously rugged and outlayed completely in royal burgundy (as to match the doorrunner and the downstepping, tonguelike runner rolled down the stairs). The entrance hall was plain, but classic with two lushly varnished end tables stood at odds in the concaving longwalls of the semicircle staircase that wrapped-up the downstairs room like a big white slumbering cobra.

The girl slowly descended the case, turned left in the grand circular room, her head still downcast and stolen by the screen of her phone. A high archway separated the entrance hall from the luxurious living space. The theme was white and modern; right of the room were couches and a row of long windows, left stood a black lacquered crescent shaped bar laid ahead of a longrow library of alcohol. The man in the painting, the slickhaired, sharpeyed, foxlike man, was there, leaning over the barcounter on his elbow with a drink in his hand, his small eyes thrown across the room where the television flickered.

[Clyde]

?Morning,? Mr. Krist said in a dry and intelligent voice. Anya continued away, eyes listing the phonescreen. ?Hello?---Daughter, dear Daughter---should I text you??

Anya kind of leaned her head back quickly as if she were electrified by his words. ?Oh,? she said sweetly. She smiled and turned his way, the phone swallowed inside her tiny hands. ?Sorry, you know I?m not much for mornings.?

Mr. Krist had returned his eyes to the television. After she spoke he nodded and absently tested his bourbon with a slight tip of the glass. Lips, lickmoistened, curved into a glistening smile then said, ?Sure, sure. Go out and find me one of these morning people.? Mr. Krist?s eyes flicked over her. ?Who?re you texting at seven A.M.? Your mother??

Anya?s arms lifted off her hips then fell back to them in some small, awkward, defensive half-flap. ?You told me not to let this whole thing ruin our relationship,? she said, her voice leaned towards annoyance. ?You said---you said it.?

The bourbon was set down, his lips relicked, recurved. ?And did I say it with animosity?? he asked ?I was curious, that?s all. I would never tell you to stop talking to her.? He took up his glass and drank deeply until only several bronze cubes and coil of brown syrup were left within. The glass was pushed aside; Mr Krist grinned harshly and pressed on his daughter with his old, little eyes. ?Despite how happy it would make me, Daughter-O-My-Daughter.?

[Clyde]

Anya opened her hand and peered into the screen of her phone. She had a message half-typed to ?Mom?: ?Ill call u later, hes up?. She locked the screen, smiled servilely and pulled both her arms behind her back. ?Very funny,? Anya said. She sat down on one of the stools on the bar?s outer curve, laid her arms atop the nice, smooth counter and smiled up at her father. She closed her left eye and continued to look squintedly and with a flimsy grin out of the left end of her mouth, wrinkling that unfortunate already-crushed cheek under the slipeye. ?Is that what a good father should say, Daddy? Telling me not to text mom with a drink in your hand and---what time is it??

She tried for her phone, tried to thumb the button but Mr. Krist verbally extinguished her bounds, her lazy recovery with, ?7:23---? He leaned further over the counter and it looked, to Anya, as if he might jump completely over it. He did not; he was trying to catch more of the television screen with his old, cloudy eyes. ?---23 or 73.? Grinning, Mr. Krist disarmed the leaping pose and took to again a leisurely, napping lean into the barcounter.

Anya turned around and nodded. ?--yeah. 7:73--you?re right, how weird. What does that mean?? When she turned her grin to her father she found that his grin was longer and sharper.

The smile unspooled to let in the rim of the glass that had no bronze to give; the icecubes ran into his teeth and knocked some pain into his eyes. Extinguishing, he again smiled and reached out for his bourbon bottle. ?It means the end is nigh obviously, Anya. Probably best that you cancel all appoints, lock all doors and hide out in the basement.? Mr. Krists eyebrows stepped up and all the curvy waves in his forehead jolted up with them.