“Can’t we just pretend that this is not insane?  Can’t we just go on into the future cherishing everything precious here as if none of this sordid, admittedly terrible, OK, unspeakable, history had ever happened between us?” he asked, a pleading look on his desperate face.  

For her part, she couldn’t keep from stealing glances at the bizarre looking twisted metal object his hand was clutching so tightly as the other hand gesticulated like maddened bird on a leash.

“It’s not as if people don’t get over all kinds of traumatic things,” he said, reasonably, under the circumstances.

She thought she’d managed to begin loosening the adapter cable that had been tied around her wrists.  The trick was to keep working it while maintaining pleasant eye contact with the maniac.  In the back of her mind, an odd thought nagged.    

“I know I wrote the entire story of this sick relationship, in great detail.  It might come in very handy at some point,” she thought “if only I could find the goddamned thing!”  The trouble was, the clutter in her computer mirrored the clutter on her desk, her kitchen table, the floor by the Lazy Boy.  She hadn’t used his name in the piece, which made it almost impossible to find.   Hard to search the hard drive, all the external drives, the email account, if you don’t have the right key word, she’d discovered.  It was maddening.

“Are you even listening to me?” he said, with great pain in his eyes, his right hand stiff on the weird and threatening looking metal tool.