*

Sometimes words and sometimes eggs, dancing in threes. Or a blank notebook, beautifully engraved, which I store in a soft cloth bag because it is beautiful. There are no notes inside, and never will there be, but the pages have the feel of pages. Of notebook pages, tough and thick. Of one hundred dead erasers. The lines are broadly spaced, as if to allow large and obtrusive words like ___________________.

*

The cover is leather and, strangely, padded. Perhaps the book’s appearance is merely a consideration of stealth, and perhaps the book was designed to resemble a book so as to catch bookish types off-guard. The unwitting aristocrat, his secrets beaten from him over tea. The combination to a closet safe. Hoarded cocaine and baseball cards. Perhaps.

*

And if the aristocrat lives with his mother, and spends her money, which is not her money but her family’s money, on collectible figurines, and prostitutes, and collectible figurines of prostitutes, then the story is beginning to take shape. If there is one prostitute in particular, named Fil, whom he cannot call because he is in love with him and/or her, then this is a blank notebook.

*

So the aristocrat calls them each evening, from the guest quarters, and when they take off his glasses he thinks of Fil, and he wonders what it might be like to have a regular job, or even an irregular job, like a private detective, where the work comes sporadically and where one must be ever prepared, the breath of a stranger, the yellow cloth bag.

*

So. He takes back his glasses, he gives them mother’s money, and somehow we know nothing happened. Applause. That one could place applause upon a tongue, like a cube of sugar. Like a white cube of notebook, melting in wait. What does it matter? I am erasing all of this, dancing like an egg, watching the lovely dissolve.