They fed on self-satisfaction, applauded themselves till their hands revolted, dreamed of being low because they had brought themselves to such lofty elevations. We looked on in despair thinking that nothing could get so high as these on high telling us how on high they were. Then we stopped looking at them and saw the mountains, quiet and resolute in their peaks, formed over millennia, their apparent stillness belying their constant motion beneath. We found we preferred the mountains, if nothing else for the fact that they let us climb them, leaving gravity to be our only judges.
You’re awfully quiet for an auctioneer, she told him. When I got nothing to sell, he assured her, I got nothing to say. Say something fast, she implored, real fast like you mean to sell something. I ran out of words, he muttered, ran out so I couldn’t – he stopped. He really had run out of words and she wasn’t worth the sell.
Flowers aren’t all for giving. Some flowers are for taking. Some flowers are for eating. Some are even for grinding up and stuffing into pillows to make people think they’re sleeping in places other than they are. Spend an afternoon talking to a flower and before long you’re liable to think you are a flower. You won’t just be for giving, but for taking, for eating, for grinding up and living inside someone’s pillow, making them think they’re sleeping in a place other than they are. So much for talking up the flowers.
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