Excerpt: Punt

THREE.
Really, I was fortunate to have ever found someone like Mya, despite our recent difficulties. Imagine meeting someone who knew their future almost as well as their past, who could recount stories from various disparate timelines as though they were fond childhood memories. It would be uncanny to start with. And I had imagined that it would get old after awhile. Mya confirmed that for me.

As I went inside for lunch, she asked what the silly grin on my face was for. Then, with something that lay halfway between a smirk and a grimace, I saw she realized that today was my special day. I nodded and pursed my lips. Saying anything now would just amount to telling the same stories in different words for the thousandth time. It's true; the memory of the jump was fresher, so I migh have felt like I could put it in better words this time, but I wasn't going to bother trying; I'd done it plenty of times before and never made any headway. It was well-established convention here that I would say nothing about the jumps. There just wasn't any novelty left in it.

With a tuna salad sandwich in hand, over the Sunday Times crossword, I thought about what was soon to happen. I knew it, I knew it all and all I knew it. But the doing was an entirely different matter.