I Browse

I met her in a bookstore, browsing the non-fiction; both of us preferred to leave nothing to the imagination. I asked her if she was single, she said she usually came as a pair. I told her that was good as I liked fruit. There was a pause for a moment, and she said she had to be somewhere. I said we all have to be, somewhere. She said that was a very clever use of punctuation. I said have you ever gone into a bookshop with a pair of scissors and cut out all the words in the works of Marcel Proust and rearranged them so they make the collected fiction of Dean Koontz, and then waited to see if anyone buys it, and then when they've finally finished reading it, you go up to them and say ha! you thought you'd read In Search of Lost Time, but you've just wasted all that time reading the Koontz, and isn't that so Ironic considering the title of the original source material you initially hoped for. Ha! She said, no, she hadn't. I said, Oh, I haven't either. She offered to buy me a coffee, but I said I didn't drink. She said she'd get me an instant sans the l'eau, so I could just lick the powder. I guess that would work, I said, and followed her up the stairs.