Re: Arcade: Gwen & Perry
Over the last few days Perry had decided it was important to remember that Gwen ("my Gwen from New York" was the way he thought of her in his head, associated with a library of touch, taste and related memories) was gone, and this was a different Gwen. The hair helped, a slight change of tone and temperature that helped him pretend for longer at time that the two women were different. It was strange that she looked just the same, and it made him feel like a traitor every time he felt any admiration or wonder at the way she moved or smiled. The way she spoke was just a little bit different, maybe the product of living out here and not in the whirlwind of accent that was Queens, or maybe in his head. He clung to the differences, and tried to make a new space for her in his mind. Anything to keep that grief somewhere else.
When she spoke, Perry immediately took his free hand out of his pocket, and rotated slowly as she moved around him back toward the pinball machine, keeping her in view. He made an involuntary movement as her shoe caught in the progress, but he caught himself long before she did and avoided touching her unnecessarily as she righted herself. Perry drifted a little bit, as if she had her own gravitational field, after her, and watched the flippers move as she pushed them before drifting back out with the tide toward the crane machine. He fed it with a couple quarters and it bleeped and jerked before he maneuvered the joystick around with concentration.
He hit the button and the little crane dropped, grasped nothing, then pulled sideways and caught on an elephant tusk, hauling it upward. "Yeah, most games. Reaction time, you know."