If I do not vividly describe it, you will think the scene is dull; forgive me if you fail to believe even half the story. I know she emerged from a month's silent retreat at Ban Ban in love; another temporary monk from the States, who said he was moved by the way she blinked after a rainstorm—yes, he said just that. If you can believe it, he held her in mute adoration, and with her, a world of simple cantankerous things: crockery exploded by machine gunners at a local base camp, rounds hot and hollow as clocks, ticking off the next reload and another decanter placed atop the stump; the dead weight of the courtyard's autumn sump of wet blue branches; a spot in the vaults they came to share in secret, by chance meeting after the morning rites and special salted eggs—well, you mustn't believe it. What Emerson called the eternal man is dead, that sense of the storyteller as communal cathexis; it is more contemporary than that, the mere collection of coincidences, some creeping to bed to sleep quietly alongside, others just standing in doorways. When I tell it, the two must actually touch, she must speak to him: a few sultry and assonant words, which in the telling break at least one promise.© Seth Abramson
from Indiana Review