Glacier

By comparison with how I read normally, from a book in my hands, I am reading Les Misérables at work more like a very slow reader would be reading it; maybe someone learning to read in prison, or in childhood, or in recovery from an accident or stroke. Simply unable because I am working to consume the text the way I crave to--all-consumingly, with focused greed and both ears stoppered, adder-deaf between the heaving pages--each day I take a very little at a time: I nibble. I go back to the beginnings of chapters and re-read to where I last left off: in fact, I gnaw. As if, dropped from intelligent space, it fit right into my diet of berries and bone marrow, I'm reading Les Misérables at work like a Neanderthal woman on the go.