The concerns of your Designated Mate are your concerns.

Posing as a beauty means not reading what you would like to read on a rocky shore in the South of France.

People rarely look the way you expect them to

In the dark, no one notices the blood, which is covered with dirt and barely visible.At some point, the street lights come on and the empty bus is driven away. Cars speed down the road again, and it is as if nothing has happened. By midnight, the street is almost empty. A street-cleaning truck approaches from a distant intersection, where the traffic lights flash intermittently next to a blue poster on an iron railing. Printed in white are the words “for your well-being and that of others, please observe traffic rules.” At the spot where the accident occurred, the truck slows and, with high-powered jets of water, flushes away any remaining traces of blood.The street cleaners have no way of knowing that an accident took place here a few hours ago and that the unfortunate victim died. But who was the victim? In this city of several million people, he was likely known only to his family and his friends. And if he wasn’t carrying identification papers even they may not yet know about the accident. The man was probably the child’s father, and it is possible that the child will be able to tell the authorities his name. If the man was the father, he must have had a wife, too. And yet he was the one picking up the child, so he was both a good father and a good husband. Because he loved his child, presumably he also loved his wife, but did his wife love him? If she loved him, why didn’t she fulfill her responsibilities as a mother and pick up the child herself?Maybe the man had a miserable life and that’s why he was so distracted. Maybe it was a flaw in his personality and he was always indecisive. Maybe something had been troubling him, something he couldn’t resolve, and he was simply fated to fall victim to this even greater misfortune. However, if he had set out a little later or a little earlier, he might have avoided disaster. Or if, after picking up the child, he had pedalled faster or slower, or if he had spoken longer with the woman at the nursery school, or if, on the way, he had run into a friend and stopped to talk . . .

accident

“You can all be witnesses—all of you saw it!”

But there is no sign of external injury.

The bus’s front wheels have come to a stop in a pool of blood, and blood is dripping from the bus back onto the man’s body.

There is a sudden silence,

In the clamor of the horn, the brakes, and the woman’s screams, but before onlookers have time to gasp, the man is crushed under the wheels of the bus. The bicycle he was riding is twisted and thrown ten feet away.

As the bus gets closer and closer, its horn gets louder and louder, and then there is a piercing screech of brakes. The bicycle is still moving forward.

headaches

We always laugh off such things, because you have to keep your mind on the work and we would gain nothing by getting disheartened so early on.

such that the inner consciousness rotates like a gyroscope in its hoop

Walking is getting to be more difficult, keeping up the routine; we suspect that one solitary night of neglect could spell doom for the mancuspias