Sunhat, an excerpt from Everything Like Before

Photograph by Matthew Murdoch / Flickr

They sat reading. Neither of them had spoken for a while, when she suddenly said: “When we go to Yugoslavia I’m going to get one of those sunhats I didn’t buy myself last year.”

“What page are you on?” he asked.

“Thirty-three. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

She did not say any more and continued reading. For reasons he did not understand he found himself thinking about an exchange he had heard the previous night through the open window. First, a man’s voice, from the street: “I couldn’t be bothered flirting with you anymore.” Then the voice of a woman, from a window (he thought): “Why not?” “I never get anywhere with it, do I?” That was it, not a word after that.

She was reading. He was sitting with his book open but was not reading; he looked at her. He thought: what was it that made her think of a sunhat?

After a while she put the book down.

“I’m going to fry an egg,” she said. “Do you want one?”

“No, thanks.” He didn’t like fried eggs.

She went out to the kitchen and he picked up her book and turned to page thirty-three. He could find nothing there to account for the calling to mind of a sunhat or Yugoslavia. He thought: I can’t figure her out, I thought I knew her, but I understand less and less about her. He decided to read all the pages preceding number thirty-three, maybe the answer lay there, but she came back in to fetch a cigarette, and he quickly put the book down again. Because he felt like a snoop and thought she had seen him