Fiction Friday – Toast

Toast
When I was a kid, I preferred my toast cut into triangles, and I would leave the corner crusts uneaten, like a set of parentheses, on my plate. If birth and death are the parentheses of our lives then how do we punctuate the in-between spaces? Do I count the crumbs on the plate as moments of my life as I try to expand the distance between the opening and the closing of eyes. Laying foundations. Erecting scaffolding, shoring up the walls and ceiling. And hoping it holds. Somewhere in the act of doing, between packing my school bag, holding her hand for the first time, pushing the trolley through the supermarket, replacing the toilet paper roll, doing the washing up after dinner, finding some space on the couch between the television programs, and imagining a life lived between the junk mail catalogues, I learned how to turn nouns into verbs. I still leave the parentheses of crusts on my plate.