You lay them neatly on the table, as if you were dealing a stack of cards, the titles face down, the blurbs like a code I was supposed to fathom. Fathom is a curious word, I thought, buying time, recalling depth and perhaps the calculated reach of an arm.I didn't know you still have these books and you wanted to return them to me. Wilde and Hardy and Mann and something else I could not recall I owned once. You reach for this volume and turn it over--revealing--Ishiguro.
'Never Let Me Go,' you say, and in the second between your whisper and the turning of the book, I fooled myself that you meant it. But the words hang in the air like motes of dust, and I start gathering the books, shuffling them back, into a stack.
