Undifferentiated

whisperthroughthewall:

Set amongst the excesses of their contraption and the instruments of their routine experimentations, the Luteces ate their meal. Supper was late but the pair never dined alone; they finished each daily task or quota together or not at all. With their own hands they prepared their evening meals. The sun had set hours before, as much as it could in these cold months. Their vantage lingered so high that the horizon was always tinged with a frail gleam of incandescent blue beyond the points of light that clustered in the buildings of Columbia and rivaled the stars. This evening the pair had foregone their electric lights and lit, instead, a few candles between them. The moon shone in its muted silver and chilled and sharpened every shadow into fine points but spared their little sphere of warm light.

Over their meager dinner Robert produced a slim volume bound in cheap blue paper, the folio nearly pulled from its binding by its age. The flames shivered in the drafty room.

“Where did you get this?” Rosalind eyed its cover as he splayed the book between his palms. Leaves of Grass; their library scattered the floor of their shared rooms but she had never spied this little text among their disordered stacks.

“I brought it with me.” He gave his answer with a small smile at his mouth. “Picked it up from a bookshop in New York the day I came here.”

“Something tells me it would be illegal, if anyone here knew what it was.”

“Yes,” he said, turning the frail leaves, thin and sheer like pages from a holy text, to his dog-eared mark. “Yes, it would be.”

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