Night's quiet, tiny origami folded into seahorses and houses. Chocolate, nibbled in a cigar shop. Beer after beer while sausage sizzled and shrimp hissed. Smile-snatchers in little-girl form. Butt-piercing splinters - that's the risk you take when you sit in a stranger's backyard. Crying blue herons. Brown pelicans in flight, looking like pterodactyls winging breezily above the city.

Last night, a young man who paints and a young woman who makes square animals came to our apartment. The young man sat with my young man and discussed painting while the young woman sat with me in the kitchen, to drink a type of tea suggested to have stimulatory effects akin to coffee and cocaine. However I yawned by 11 and thought of work the next day.

With her big brown eyes, the young woman noticed little things: the lilliputian butcher knife hanging from a slanted beam over the sink, the to-do "go to donut shops" sloppily scrawled on the blackboard, the "no shitting" sign in the bathroom. Later Jimmy said, She's into details. No kidding. She suggested we needed four holes cut into a wall supporting our peninsular counter, so that we could rest our knees as we dine and sup.




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