23 : TO OTHER LANDS, TO OTHER TIMES

Those difficulties, these reassurances. Somewhat interesting in that I watched him watch her, who watched me watch without him knowing. They’d spoken in the café. Her with slight Asian accent. Him with straightforward American, paying just enough attention over his laptop. They timed a rendezvous between her cell phone & his computer. When she crossed the crosswalk she looked over her shoulder at him, at me, as I watched all three. Then, after glancing down at the front page of the newspaper with fires in Spain & floods in Switzerland, she’d bent over a good-sized granite stone in the park across the street, left foot lifted upon it, back turned contorted down to fix a sandal. Nothing in the paper, surely nothing he looked at on the screen could have been as transmogrifying to other lands, to other times. Only this fiction.