Tuk-Tuk for Two

by Adam Fletcher

“I don’t like lies.” “Who likes lies? That’s not a thing. No one wakes up and says, ‘Do you know what I’d really fancy today? Being lied to. Double deception with a side of falsehood, please.’”

She often translated from German, which resulted in some creative nouning. German is all about the nouns in the same way Imelda Marcos was all about the shoes.

I love this element of non-native speaker language

Securityland. Where we’re reduced to human cattle. Where we’re stripped, patted, scanned, stamped, tagged, and prodded in pens guarded by armed uniforms trying to convince us of the impossible: that we’re safe and that all this aggressive, inconvenient tomfoolery is in our best interests.

Does Evelyn take drugs? What drugs? Does she get them from men? What men? She didn’t seem the drug type. Although whisky is a drug, I guess. Coffee is a drug. Lust is a drug. I was getting very, very high just looking at her. Everything we do changes everything we are. Drug is a mostly meaningless word.

In French there’s an expression—L’esprit de l’escalier (“the wisdom of the staircase”)—for the thing you should have said at the time but only think of later.