Do you know what friendship is... it is to be brother and sister; two souls which touch without mingling, two fingers on one hand.

--Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885)

Scattered cumin and fennel seed; cooking dinner for the evening. While she waits for the water to boil, she shuffles through the mail. She picks up a thick ivory envelope and smiles, looping her hair behind her ears, then reaches a finger beneath the edge of it to pry it open. The glue smells faintly sweet and the paper is so crisply folded she slices her thumb open in effort of removing the letter.


She unfolds the clipping cut from the Baltimore Sun:



She sucks on her thumb until it clots, tasting cumin slowly overlaid by cinnamon and copper.

She reaches for the phone.

The Museum of Science and Industry.

She never wanted to see it all in one visit. With the Omnimax theater, the coal mine, the Zephyr and the other technological exhibits. (Ana's favorite: the glass plasma globe with those snakes of contained lighting that react to the touch of a hand.) A visit and walk that was irresistible during those rare weeks of Indian summer, when it was warm and humid enough that you desperately wanted to be inside and cool.

And it was a good place to go kill an afternoon with a new boyfriend. Oliver was scum. Or at least he had a totally scummy side, but Ana didn't find that out until a month later. In mid-September she was in serious like with a Physics graduate who could afford roses (she hated them) but never dinner (that was fine, she enjoyed cooking) and could kiss with his eyes open and that was always a little weird. A funny-looking guy over a foot taller than her, with long hair and wretched taste in T-shirts but wonderful taste in books.

(They were like lighting contained.)

It was evening, they had been duly kicked out of the museum at closing. So, they wandered to the Japanese garden around the back. When she first visited the Osaka garden, she wasn't sure why they called it a Japanese garden, which she always thought was a rather spare arrangement of sand and stones in a box not much bigger than a dining table. But this place, this niwa was lush. A composition of rock and water. It had winding paths and large, strangely beautiful (red Maples with names that made her toes curl, like Bloodgood and Crimson Queen) trees. Mostly it had secluded nooks, and statues, and a teahouse that made you feel hidden away from everything under shifting layers of green and shadow.

It was naturally the perfect place.

She doesn't remember anything about the date (and Oliver) except for the time spent in the teahouse, but, it wasn't a bad way to spend a day..

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

Ana Pascal shook the flour from her hands and wiped them on her apron. She found the beaters at the back of the drawer and pressed them into the electric mixer. Her new composition notebook was propped open on the counter. She stared at the recipe. Endless fine print ran across the page in chicken hieroglyphics, obscuring what ought to be a simple task.

"Add two eggs," she muttered. "Mix them with the flour, zest, butter and milk."

She cracked the eggs into the bowl, and the yellow yolks goggled up at her like blank, unseeing eyes. The mixer whirred against the ceramic bowl. The cake mixture splattering everywhere. She laughed, and wiped the batter from her cheek. With great concentration, she poured the mix into the pans and set them in the oven.

Forty minutes to read up for tonight's study group.

At the kitchen table, she reached for a well-thumbed book. The Philosophy of Law it read in tiny letters down its spine.

Jurisprudence couldn't unravel the riddle of what was right or wrong with the life she wanted.

Within moments, she paused to puzzle over an idea, then surged onward through the text.

Were there other possibilities?

Ana did not look back at the reading, too lost in the pure thought of the unknown that teased the fringes of her mind. Until the timer went off, and snatched the oven mitts to pull the pans from the oven to cool on the rack.

And there, holding the cake pan in her mitted hands like an unearthed relic, was the answer.