Mumble Herder

All day, between sorting through hip-hop cookbooks and volumes of self-help for overachievers, she skimmed over the vanilla-scented pages. Isolde's confession that she wished Tristan would clip his toenails more often. Antony's bath-house boasts of bedroom mastery over Cleopatra. A bit of stone-carved doggerel from one of Sappho's lovers, complaining of the poet's table manners. At a quarter to five she closed the book, ran her fingers along the binding, and classed it under Disappointment, Inevitable: cross-referenced with Biological Imperatives and Persistence, Bittersweet.