The Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

The interesting thing about having to stand there and wait for her to finish before I left for lunch was that, even though we had been in the middle of a conversation whose interrupted momentum was what was holding me there, the longer I stood, the less likely it became that we would resume where we had left off, not because we had forgotten the thread, but because we had been discussing light, dismissable subjects, and neither of us wanted to be perceived as having paid too close attention to them: we wanted to preserve their status as chance observations that we had happened to make in the midst of a hundred other equally interesting items in our lives we might just as easily have mentioned to each other.

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.

A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.