The fluent version

Caught myself at the Marshalls' barbecue explaining to somebody I had met forty minutes earlier that Greg Feldman and Danny parted ways amicably. Amicably. I used the word amicably about a year that cost eleven months and a loan against a house, and I used it smoothly, in a garden, holding a beer, and the woman nodded and asked something about the market and we moved on and nobody noticed anything at all. I have a fluent version of that year. It is about ninety seconds long, it is slightly funny in the middle, and it ends with these things happen. I have delivered it to Danny's mother, to two sets of friends, to a mortgage broker, and now to a stranger at a barbecue. The thing about a fluent version is that it is not a lie. Everything in it is true. It is just been sanded until it has no edges, and after four years of delivering it I notice that I have started believing the sanded one in daylight and the other one only turns up at three in the morning and in drawers. I do not know what the un-sanded version even sounds like any more. I could not deliver it. If somebody said tell me what actually happened with Greg I think I would produce the ninety seconds automatically before I had decided anything. Danny drove home. I did not put the radio on. He did not ask.