Record Thirty-Eight

I don’t know what title⁠—Perhaps the whole synopsis may be called a cast-off cigarette-butt.

I awoke. A bright glare painful to look at. I half closed my eyes. My head seemed filled with some caustic blue smoke. Everything was enveloped in fog and through the fog:

“But I did not turn on the light⁠ ⁠… then how is it.⁠ ⁠…”

I jumped up. At the table, leaning her chin on her hand and smiling, was I-330 , looking at me.

She was at the very table at which I am now writing. Those ten or fifteen minutes are already behind me, cruelly twisted into a very firm spring. Yet it seems to me that the door closed after her only a second ago and that I could still overtake her and grasp her hand⁠—and that she might laugh out and say.⁠ ⁠…

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