About the Night

by Anat Talshir

When you request death like you would the check,” he said, pantomiming asking a waiter for the bill, “you decide when your meal is over. And when does that happen? When you lift your eyes to the door that leads you out. When you aspire more to there than to here.”

“Nobody knows,” Nomi said, “what exists beyond the moment we close our eyes.”

“Have you been waiting long for me?” she asked. “My whole life,” he said.

Although the two were children of the same land and shared its earth, each possessed a different story about the place.

Things that were said were absorbed by the skin, not lost to the air.

“a Chinaman went out to be alone in nature. He gathered some herbs, tested them on himself, mixed and concocted and poisoned himself seventy times, since every medicinal plant is also a poison depending on how it is used. That day he was boiling water for himself over a fire built on sticks. A breeze blew leaves from a nearby hill and some of them fell into the boiling water. And that is how, according to the legend, the world’s first cup of tea was born.”

Sometimes the most lofty emotions, the ones that are nearly unattainable, can be found surprisingly nearby.

Tea cannot grow in sooty or polluted places; it needs clean air, quiet, and inspiration.