Impossible

Hurts.

She needs to think.

Think.

But she can't. There's pain, pain of a kind she's never felt before. There's the knife.

She's pretty sure she's in shock. 

Knowing doesn't help. 

She stares at the knife. It's a big one. Her mother gave it to her when she moved here to Urbald for college. Every kitchen needs a good knife, Hiri. Now give me a zat.  A knife can never be a gift. Give a knife as a gift and it cuts love. 


Hiri thinks that maybe she didn't give her mother enough money. Maybe if she'd given a difar instead of a zat ...


She knows every contour, every flaw, of the handle. She's seen that knife every day for a year and a half.

She's never seen it before. 

Have to think.

It's not possible.  It is, quite simply, impossible. The knife her mother gave her is stuck upright, tip wedged firmly into the top of the kitchen table.

Between the hilt of the knife and the tip is her hand. 

The knife is going through my hand.

It's impossible. 

It's even less possible that Jemadar put it there. 


Not by accident.


I had to tell him I was leaving. I needed my ID, my bankchip.


The keys to unlock the front door.


All those things are lying an inch from her fingers, just where he put them, just where they were when she reached for them and Jemadar picked up the knife ...


Not possible.


And yet.


There is the knife. There is her hand. 


Have to think.


Thinking is something else that is impossible. 


She can sense an idea looming at the edge of her mind, an idea that she can't bear to have, an idea she pushes away as hard as she can.


The only way I'm getting out of here is if I pull out the knife.


The thought makes her retch. She can't, she won't, she can't touch the knife. Pull it out of her hand?


Impossible. 


Hiri is still staring at the knife when Jemadar comes back. 


There isn't a single word inside her that she can speak to him. 


He doesn't say a thing.

He spills something on the floor. It smells tangy, ozoney, like the fumes from the shuttlebus. 


He has a match.


It's not possible. Impossible. 


Unpossible.


She wonders why there's no such word as unpossible.  There should be. It's a good word.

It's unpossible that the floor is in fire. It's unpossible that he's leaving.It's unpossible that she can hear the key turn in the lock as he closes the door behind him.


Her keys are still on the table. 


The knife is still in her hand.


Impossible.


There's a new smell, along with the mechanical odor of whatever is running in rivers of fire around her. It smells like the smoke that drifts from the roasting pits in the camps after the dances.


It's not a calf on a spit that she can smell.


It's her.


Impossible.


She reaches for the hilt.


The world is full of flame.


Im - 


Possible.