Less

Zohra’s voice comes loudly from her camel: “Shut the fuck up! Enjoy the fucking sunset on your fucking camels! Jesus!”

Tomorrow, love will surely deepen its mystery.

And to steal that—to steal his mind—burglar Life! Like cutting a Rembrandt from its frame.

“No one has ever been hopelessly in love with me.”

“No,” Carlos says. “You always gave them hope, didn’t you?”

“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.”

“Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.”

Less stands below it, experiencing that Wonderland sensation of having been shrunk, by Finley Dwyer, into a tiny version of himself; he could pass through the smallest door now, but into what garden? The Garden of Bad Gays.

And Less feels it swelling up within him, the phrase he does not want to say and yet, somehow, by the cruel checkmate logic of conversation, is compelled to say:

“Thank you.”

Nobody is kidding. They are dead serious.

Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

Life was not hard; you shouldered it bravely, knowing all the time that if you sent the signal, help would arrive.