I’m Going To Move To The South Of France

I’m going to get up every morning and shave over a basin and then put on a suit. Sharp. I’m going to walk down a street made of little stones. There will be baskets of flowers depending from iron hooks mortared into the stuccoed buildings. The dogs will lift their heads but not bark as I pass by. I will have a cane, for no particular reason. I will buy a newspaper in the wrong language and a baguette, and pay with some form of coin. No matter what it costs, it has to be paid for with coins.

Or perhaps they will give it to me because they like my last book. I wrote it in pencil, because I no longer have a computer, or a television, or a telephone, or a business card, or a PO box, or an email address, or a Pinterest page, or much of anything else, really. I will have a bank account through which you can contact me. When I return home I will open the casements wide to the morning and my wife will make coffee and we will sit by the window and eat toast made from the baguette and talk about our children.

I will be the old man that passes by, dressed too impeccably for the weather and the zeitgeist, and my wife will be the woman who is always immaculately turned out until the day she passes on to a place that deserves her.

And during our peregrinations, if you accost us with a lean and hungry look in your eyes, and malice in your heart, I will produce a misericorde out of nowhere and gut you like a fish.