They spent the morning making breakfast with coffee and toasting the bread from last night with butter and jam and a yellow egg and he said, “I never get over how different the dairy tastes here…the milk is like some other drink altogether.”
“It’s like liquid cheese,” she said.
“I guess it is,” he said. “I suppose they feed the cows to make cheese for adults… not just for brats to dump over their Cocoa Puffs.”
He opened his book (Murakami short stories) and she opened hers (Moby Dick, which she’d somehow never read) and the morning melted into the afternoon with silence and the dog panting and coffee and words and then the light changed and the book changed and he couldn’t read anymore… each word would send him on a chain of thoughts about his own life and it would pull him out of the story untill he had to start the page over again and then another word would set the wheels spinning untill in frustration, he shut the book.

Two bound books from gundunasu u zeneize of Amsterdam, from The Library Project


“It’s pointless,” he said.
“What is?”
“I can’t read anymore… I’m full, let’s eat.”
“Open the Cote de Rhone we got at the Migros,” she said… or we could go for a walk?”
He was still thinking about the stories in his life that had pulled him out of the book: the painful moments, the dumb things said to smart people, the spinning shame.
“Well?” she said. “What will it be.”
“Let’s have a glass of wine and then walk the wolf.”
The dog raised it’s ears as if to say, “Are you talking about walks?”

Posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 11:07 am.
All original artwork appearing in this blog is available for purchase. Please enquire here.