8  The Demo

My third reply was not a sentence.
In the last four, Hedda said,
As always, “How’s the book?” I asked
“Can I show you?” instead.

She looked at me a moment, then
Turned her monitor my way.
I had rehearsed it for a week:
Each evening, I would stay

At the kitchen table, run the tool
On Full Stop, and talk through
What it found, to nobody, against
A four-minute timer, too.

The first night took me nine. By the end
Of the week, four would do,
And I no longer needed notes,
Which I brought anyway, too.

It found the same thing every night;
I liked it for that. There,
The shop in four, the shop in nine,
One claim they couldn’t share.

I knew where on the screen they’d sit,
How long they’d take to land,
And for the moment they appeared,
I had a sentence at hand.

I plugged into her monitor
And ran it. It reads the list
Of claims, then chapters; for each claim,
Each sentence, none missed,

With chapter, line. Most of them are green,
And go too fast to read.
The two shops, in under a second, came,
Near the bottom, at speed:

One claim; two sentences beneath,
From chapters four and nine,
On who had made the dash the fashion,
Each with a different line.

The claim was orange, as expected,
Seven nights, every one.
Beneath the shops were three more. Those
I’d not expected: none.

The night before, I’d fixed a thing.
Chapter three held a date
On the tool’s list since the first Sunday,
A decade off from eight.

I’d made chapter three agree with eight.
It took one sentence. Then
I went to bed, pleased. I hadn’t run
The tool, after, again.

I had rehearsed the demo; I
Had not rehearsed the book.
The date was not just in chapter three:
It was in three more. Look:

Three sentences, three chapters, which
Had matched three’s date for years,
Untold. On Hedda’s monitor
The date, a claim, appears

Once, at the top, and under it
Five places where it stayed,
Three in red, disagreeing with
The sentence the night before I’d made.

I’d had a sentence for the shops.
For this, I’d nothing. So
I showed her: pointed at the claim
And each line under it, to show

Which chapter it came from, and what about.
It took more than the four.
Easier than any answer, in three years,
I’d given her before.

I did not have to describe it: there,
In five lines, on her screen.
Hedda read it, not the summary
At the bottom: what lay between.

Around the third of the five lines,
The half hour ran out.
Hedda has a hard stop at the half hour.
She watched all of it, throughout.

She asked one question, in the middle.
Pointing at the shops, she went
Straight to the color, and asked me
What the orange meant.

“Contradicts, but I like it,” I said.
She wrote that down. And where,
I don’t know. When the tool was done,
The screen held, sitting there,

Four contradictions, and a count
Below that told the score.
Hedda sat back and looked a while,
Then asked one question more:

Was the book done? “No,” I said.
I heard myself say so.
The true answer, for the first time,
Was shorter than the show.

She nodded, wrote something down, and we
Both stood, nine minutes late.
Her running document is shared with me;
I open it more than I’ll state.

It changed again that week:
Book: demo.