READING

He stopped reading after a page. Something in the beginning of the book, in the first paragraph or two, before characters or setting were established, before any plot could be unfurled let alone comprehended, had moved him, in the full sense of the word, and he was not in the park anymore, not watching the robust woman across the narrow paved path untangle her dog’s leash from the leg of a bench, not listening to the conversation of the older couple parked in a patch of shade (they had been together for a decade, married for a year, and one of the men was pretending loud regret that they had tied the knot), not positioning himself vigilantly so that he could keep an eye on the freak-denim pair at his back (the young man seemed like a pickpocket; the girl seemed like someone whose chemical proclivities might require her companion to pick pockets and pass her whatever cash turned up). All of that had left him, or he it, the minute he started moving through the book, when a short stretch of language, a few words really, a verb that surprised him, a noun he didn’t expect, an adjective placed daringly, had come up off the page, pierced him like an arrow or a blade, and sent him to what seemed not exactly like an afterlife but like an additional one. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas