·
You will stare at one another through the darkness. Eye to eye, breath to breath, then you will watch as a lightning twitch of muscle propels it into the hawthorn, and away. And you will think, ‘how beautiful,’ then smile and shift into gear, gently squeezing the accelerator.
·
Beyond the window, I see their sedan parked out front and notice the stickers plastered all over it, all the places they’ve been to together, and I think about how nice it must be to travel with someone, to do something like that; collect stickers you can plaster all over your car. You can drive…
·
The café where they sit, makes the best espresso in town, so strong it gives you goosebumps. It’s why she’d insisted on meeting there and not at that other, cheaper place on the Prinsengracht Ella prefers. Such are the insignificant details on which decisions turn. Fateful, only when you look back.
·
Taormina, that’s where it was. They’d walked up the steep stone steps into town and at the top, when she looked up, she’d caught sight of the snowy peak of Etna in the distance. She had expected something violent, ugly even, so its beauty, the gentle incline of its slopes, had surprised her.
·
‘ESO 378 Nebula,’ he says. ‘ESO, that means it was taken by the European Southern Observatory. The number, well, that’s for identification. And nebula, that’s the classification. It tells you what it is.’
