Futility

'Don't forget to buy some milk and sugar for tomorrow's breakfast. And yes, if you pass by the library, drop in at the tailor to ask if the children's trousers are ready.'

He came in a few hours later with a vacant look on his face, deeply absorbed in some vagrant world of his the centre of which was nowhere and the circumference everywhere.

'Did you?', she asked, hoping against hope.

'Did I what?', he replied quizzically.

She didn't say anything.

She went out into the terrace and saw the orange sun gently setting over the hills like a drop of blue water deliciously dissolving into the fathomless ocean.

'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity', an old preacher had once proclaimed. She wondered how she had become so vain as to presume that a man would be able to understand her.