Faded Houses Green

A box sat over the gravetrestles, but it was not a coffin. It was an empty box, but it was still not a coffin. It was just an empty box.

Miriam looked up the word pedantic in the dictionary and asked her lover if it was pedantic to use the word pedantic. Her lover said in lovemaking? Miriam said any time. Her lover said yes. Miriam thought about the box she saw three days earlier on the gravetrestles at the funeral across the lawn from her mother’s grave. Miriam though that’s a pedantic box if I ever saw one, but no one asked her about pedantic, because the funeral party was too far away, no one else was around, and her mother was muted by six feet of loam and three years of sleep. Miriam’s mother would have asked her what was so pedantic about the box, but she couldn’t, so Miriam asked herself. Miriam’s answer was that she forgot what it meant and would have to look it up in three days during an intimate encounter with her lover–being certain to forget in the intervening interval.

Her lover said yes, but what are we doing in this box? Miriam said let’s look up the word “ardent”.