We were standing by the new bus stop, which they had just added to the side of the road, where a bush used to be. The land was owned by the city, and the bush, technically, was trespassing on government property. Like a weed, it had been cut out of the ground, and she and I, plus the metal pole that marked the bus stop, were filling up the vacancy. I hadn’t known the facts of this, she had had to tell them to me.
“Yes,” she said, “there used to be a bunch of bushes here.”
“A definite improvement,” I said.

This is how I relate to things and people: a series of comparisons leading to a qualitative judgment.

A short time later I looked up at the sky and saw that two passing jets had left intersecting trails which looked like the letter X, if you flattened it somewhat. I wanted to find out if she could compete with me in the realm of aesthetics, rhetoric and debate.
“You see that crack in the air,” I said, pointing up.
“I see the frozen arcs of fallen stars,” she said.
“Well, to me they look like ash-grey scars on the whip-riddled back of the void.”
“Maybe. Maybe, if you turn your head a certain way,” she said, “and squint.”
“The Roman numeral ten hung in a daylight constellation—”
“To what purpose?” she asked.
“To remind us of the ten fingers we have with which to toil and turn the world,” I said.
“Hardly. Man is made to be bent over the plow, for laying one stone upon another. All work points him toward the earth, and that is where he should look to find it.”
“It is not for that one, who remembers, but for the other, who forgets.”
“No, I disagree,” she said.

Then the bus came, and we got on. I showed my pass to the driver and sat next to her. The bus was crowded, but quiet. We lurched between stops and traveled down the road. Taking out the letter, I read it through again and began to compose a reply in my mind. Meanwhile she was thinking, and when she finished thinking, she looked out the window and said:

“A brush, loaded with smoke and dragged across the blue contract of the sky by the illiterate hand of a retarded angel.”