Sea-life
We went down into the cellar of the bookshop on Wednesday afternoon. He was half-way through cleaning it, earning a bit of extra cash so he could buy the leather top-siders he wanted for the fall. The cavernous stone corridors, made for the passage of monks, wound maze-like underneath the Seine and to the foundation of Notre Dame. I hadn’t been down before, so I had nothing to compare it to, but I had seen the full garbage bags hauled up to the curb so I knew it must have been even more full before. The dank darkness revealed, when illuminated by the bobbing flashlight, crumbling marbled books that were peeling off the shelves and stacked in miles cascading in the corners. White mould was blooming, spongy and effulgent, from the walls and, defying gravity, seemed to be falling upward.
We went down into the cellar of the bookshop on Wednesday afternoon. He was half-way through cleaning it, earning a bit of extra cash so he could buy the leather top-siders he wanted for the fall. The cavernous stone corridors, made for the passage of monks, wound maze-like underneath the Seine and to the foundation of Notre Dame. I hadn’t been down before, so I had nothing to compare it to, but I had seen the full garbage bags hauled up to the curb so I knew it must have been even more full before. The dank darkness revealed, when illuminated by the bobbing flashlight, crumbling marbled books that were peeling off the shelves and stacked in miles cascading in the corners. White mould was blooming, spongy and effulgent, from the walls and, defying gravity, seemed to be falling upward.
Lime Blossoms
George had just made a fresh pot of iced tea and it hadn’t quite cooled yet. “I make it all the time, all day long, all the time,” he said in his playful and gruff voice.
“It’s delicious, George!” I said, genuinely surprised.
“I know, that’s because I make it all the time! My secret, though, is that I use fresh lime blossoms.” He sampled the tepid tea from its jug and then carried a thoroughly-wrung lemon over to the over-flowing garbage. I noticed a jar of Coleman’s Hot English mustard on the shelf with a label from what must have been the early ‘80’s. A cockroach scuttled across it.
“Fresh lime blossoms?” I replied, patronizing and not trying to hide my impertinence, “where do you get those!?”
He didn’t stop transporting the lemon-halves to the garbage and didn’t look my way when he replied, tapping his head with his crooked hand, “Right in here,” he said, “I get them right here from my imagination, because really, they’re just what I call lemons. Lime Blossoms just sounds more poetic.”
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