Encounters of the scribbled-notepaper kind
While at lunch with a co-worker, I reached for my wallet, and a small piece of paper fluttered to the floor from my handbag. He picked it up, read it with an increasingly arched eyebrow and passed it back to me. Scribbled on it in my handwriting was:
waiflike carbon clones. the same careful grace, the same pressed hair, the same studied chatter. applying their group ethos to the room, stretching, morphing, clustered around the pool tables clutching at cues and social grace.
"So what's this?" he said. I don't remember writing it, so I replied, "It's just something I wrote, I suppose."
He looked down to the back of the sheet, where, in my handwriting, were the words 'barbed wire grills'.
"I see," he said, in the way that someone who doesn't see says 'I see'. I studied a slice of cucumber entomologically, and I could feel him doing the same to me.
But we get on famously, mostly.