Addressing the Sky
by Miriam Heddy

     

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
--"Numbers" by Mary Cornish

Larry refused to add "in bed" to the end of a fortune. Charles insisted on it. This was among the less consequential of their differences. He was one and three quarters as old as Charles, and he preferred very much not to round that up. Precision was not always valuable for its own sake. Charles and he were approximately the same height, though Charles liked to think he was taller. Larry had long ago given up any pretensions on that count.

He watched Charles separate out their meal, his chopsticks punctuating a point in the air as he complained about the inability of 'certain people' to recognize that all problems were solvable, in the fullness of time. Larry wasn't so certain of that, tending to believe in the finitude of human comprehension, though he had to admit that men like Charles did challenge one to confront the possibility that man's potential might yet remain untapped.

Then again, he tended to think that one of the benefits of a small stature was that the ceiling was always far enough away that it might as well be the sky.

—FIN—

 

© 2006

 

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