冰猫侦探社

This year I want your love and not my love back. Bounties taste sweeter when given without view of return; grants are loudlier lauded when received upon no merit. It is time to be touched, affected, and not discomfited by it. I know at any rate, be it that I hate myself beyond desert or that everything I touch tumbles beyond credit, this trial must be tried, this weight must be borne, this tax must be wiped, and this life must pass itself by, glorious or bland.

I gazed at the shopping assistant over the counter who was on the phone asking her colleague a simple question about the inventory. Then she truncated the call and haltingly hammered some clunky, jutting buttons on the landline and thus whack-a-moled another number. This time she plonked the receiver on the counter as to liberate her hands for something distracting and insignificant, which gave her an air of busyness. She didn’t ask who was answering when the call went through. She just sent shivers down the cable lines asking the same booming question, like words but a fresh tonal presentation. The voice from the other end was immediately reassembled from the electrical current, muffled, so she cut it short in a fit of impatience and parroted the same question with no creative alterations this time, apparently not interested in any illumination from the other part. And I thought to myself: This woman is just a dot.