Walk­ing on water? Why would you want to?

That other fel­low did it quite a long time ago, and now it’s hor­ri­bly boring.

Swim­ming in air… now, that’s a dif­fer­ent story. Much bet­ter than float­ing. Float­ing would be cool, if oth­ers wouldn’t be so weirded out by it.

No-one finds swim­ming strange, though, which you think is quite odd, what with the weird con­tor­tions one must enact to stay afloat.

Swim­ming is dan­ger­ous. Suf­fo­ca­tion is a real dan­ger. Same when swim­ming through air. More than one per­son has man­aged to die in the attempt.

You have to be care­ful. You’re swim­ming – you’re not going to fall, or any­thing – but there’s still a very strong and very real danger.

You must be care­ful lest you for­get how to breathe the air. The trick is remem­ber­ing that the air is not water.

Which is pretty dif­fi­cult, actu­ally. If the air is air, how could you swim through it?

Dual­ity. It’s what–

Sigh. They’re ask­ing you a question.

“Yes. And No. Equally. And unequally. Alto­gether and not at all.”

It’s per­fectly obvi­ous. You don’t know why they’re in an uproar.

It’s all the same thing.

“Yes, he killed her, but no, he didn’t.”

They don’t real­ize that air is water. You can swim through it, like water. Or else, they real­ize that it is water, but now are drown­ing, as they have for­got­ten it is also air.

Either or the other is not enough – one way you’ll never fly; the other, you’ll die.

“The assasin is one half. He may have pulled the trig­ger, but some­one else called the shots.”

That brings them all up short.

This brings them all up short. “What trig­ger?” they ask.

You keep a straight face.

“You mean you didn’t notice the gap­ing bul­let hole through her chest?”