Places

# 1

It's a cluttered office. Several months' worth of newspapers and foreign magazines are stacked on top of old and new macs, Performa 550s running O.S. 8x sit side by side iMac G4s, vintage Voltes V and Transformer figures move to attack hapless pencil holders and panda-shaped paperweights. It's every obssessive-compulsive's nightmare - one can only imagine all manner of dust mites and mutated bugs (from the computer radiation, of course) that must've built generations of colonies under the paper towers and magazine folds. It was hard to believe that real work could be done here, and it was even harder to believe that all that separated this chaotic space from the bigger world of international newspaper publishing outside was a thin, cracked sheet of glass.


# 2

His house is eerily quiet. He lives on a side-street, so very few vehicles and pedestrians pass that way. It's his bedroom she knows best, not because they make love there, rather, it's where he keeps his books. She likes looking at them, reading through them, borrowing them on occasion. His books nearly overwhelm the bed, so for her to be able to sit on it comfortably, The Narnian Chronicles, all seven of them, have to be relocated to the top of the TV. There's a cat under the bed, a pusakal that his youngest sister had brought home from her grade school three years ago. It's been dewormed at least nine times, and it refuses to eat anything but canned tuna. It's not home for her, or for him, so they both dream of other places, and other people. But oh, there were always the books.