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where the pauses fell

A Short Story by J Matthew Waters


I didn’t know the story yet, only the confidence with which it was told, the way it had arrived already finished.

We were sitting at the long table by the window, the one with the uneven leg that made everyone lean forward without noticing. Outside, the city was quiet in a way that suggested cooperation. He spoke carefully, almost casually—like someone arranging instruments on felt.

“It was one shot,” he said. “Clean. You don’t need more than that if you know what you’re doing.”

I nodded. This was how conversations worked now, I thought. Assent first, calibration later.

He went on. Dates. Distances. Angles. The words carried the polish of rehearsal. He didn’t pause to recall them, like an actor who knew the lines by heart. He paused to give them time to settle, as if they needed room to resonate.

The weapon appeared early. He named it precisely, like someone naming a thoroughbred. I didn’t know much about guns, but I knew enough to feel a faint resistance—a soft internal click, like the sound a sentence makes when it almost fits.

“That’s a lot of rifle,” I said.

He smiled, as if relieved. “Exactly. People think it’s excessive. That’s how you know it’s right.”

This seemed to be the first rule, though he never stated it outright: magnitude over explanation.

He described the crowd, the position, the line of sight. Each element locked cleanly into the next. The story was modular. It could be lifted intact and placed into any room. I imagined him telling it again the next day, the same phrasing, the same pauses, as if the pauses themselves were evidence.

I tried to locate my unease. It wasn’t disbelief. Disbelief would have given me leverage. This felt more like watching a skilled carpenter working with the wrong measurements. The cuts were precise. The table would still wobble.

“Doesn’t it bother you,” I asked, “how quickly everyone agrees?”

He looked at me with mild surprise, the way people do when you interrupt a process already underway. “Consensus isn’t quick,” he replied. “It’s earned.”

He explained how it forms. Review. Confirmation. Corroboration. He talked about sources without naming them. He talked about experts without quoting them. The nouns did the work; the verbs barely registered.

I watched his hands. They were steady. That seemed important to me—not just to the story, but to him.

At some point he said my name. The effect was immediate and unpleasant, like a hand placed lightly on the wrist.

“You’re not saying you doubt it,” he said.

“No,” I said, after a moment. “I’m saying I don’t yet understand it.”

He leaned back. The chair complained. “That’s the same thing.”

The window reflected us faintly, two versions of the same posture. Behind our faces, the city looked flat, like a stage backdrop.

He returned to the technicals. Velocity. Penetration. Caliber. Terms that promised authority without requiring commitment. I waited for the moment when the explanation would narrow, when the numbers would be forced to choose. They didn’t. They floated—precise in appearance, unmoored in practice.

“This kind of round,” he said, “doesn’t do what people think it does.”

“What do people think it does?” I asked.

He waved a hand. “They expect spectacle,” he replied.

I thought of the footage I hadn’t watched, the images relayed to me by people who claimed restraint. I thought of how spectacle always arrived late, after the narrative had already taken its position.

“Sometimes,” I said, “things look wrong because they are.”

“And sometimes,” he said, “they look wrong out of ignorance.”

The imbalance in that sentence landed harder than the sentence itself. Ignorance was assumed by default. Knowledge had to be proven, and proof looked a lot like agreement.

His phone lit up on the table and faded back to black. He didn’t read the message. The light alone seemed sufficient. I wondered how many parallel conversations were unfolding at that moment, all converging on the same phrasing, the same conclusions, like synchronized swimmers who had never practiced together.

“You know what the real problem is,” he said. “People want the story to fail. They want a mistake. It reassures them.”

“I’m not interested in mistakes,” I said. “I want the right shape.”

He laughed softly. “Stories don’t have shapes,” he said. “They have momentum.”

That almost convinced me. I considered the idea and felt where it resisted.

He began again, faster this time. The name. The distance. The rifle. Repetition as polish. Repetition as proof. My earlier unease thinned into something duller and more dangerous: fatigue. The effort required not to assent was starting to feel disproportionate.

I understood then that the story didn’t need me. It would proceed regardless. My role was ceremonial. Agreement would add weight. Resistance would register as noise.

“Do you believe it?” he asked.

The question was framed as courtesy, but it closed like a gate. Belief would implicate me. Refusal had a way of lingering in rooms I still had to enter.

“I think,” I said carefully, “that it’s being told very well.”

He frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

A bus passed outside, loud and ordinary. The room relaxed around us. I felt suddenly embarrassed by the intensity of it all, by how much effort we had spent holding the story upright.

He gathered his things. The conversation had reached its natural limit—the point where nothing new could be added without risk.

“You’ll come around,” he said, with practiced confidence.

After he left, I stayed at the table.

I tried to reconstruct the story from memory. It returned immediately, intact. The phrasing. The sequence. Even the pauses were already there, waiting. I understood then that the story’s strength wasn’t accuracy. It was fluency.

Later, when someone asked me about it, I didn’t challenge anything. I didn’t correct the rifle or the distance or the math. I kept the confidence. I kept the cadence.

But I changed one thing: where the pauses fell.

I let them fall slightly too early, where it suggested consideration instead of certainty. I softened one number. I traded one verb for another that did less work. Nothing wrong enough to be argued with. Nothing anyone could point to.

The person listening nodded. “That makes sense,” they said, with the same relief I’d heard before. But nothing mattered anymore, and nobody could say why.

I told it again later, just as smoothly. The imbalance traveled with it, small and portable, like a flaw introduced upstream. The story continued, but everywhere it landed, something was slightly off.


january two thousand twenty-six
copyright j matthew waters
all rights reserved