THE LOYAL DOG

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He is in his bathroom. He inspects his face in the mirror. He is beginning to believe that the visage does not hide too much information. It is just a horizon that the more forthright think they have crossed when they look at him. However, people usually get things wrong. His eyes have never been the thing that allows insight into his inner workings. When he hits his boiling point, his cheeks blush bright red, but his eyes remain calm in an attempt not to reveal anything. Maybe the cheeks are the mirror of mental states? The mouth definitely is. He cannot hide his crooked smile when he pretends to enjoy somebody’s company, in a situation he finds distressful. And there are plenty of those, everybody would agree. It is a smile that mostly resembles a rictus. Sometimes he gets scared that his face might stay that way, if he goes overboard with faking enjoyment.

Similarly, he cannot hide his doglike smile of delight when a person that excites him makes him laugh. He does not even have to like the person; he finds things that are not too familiar, nor beautiful sometimes, exciting. His lips spread over his canines, glinting in all their glory, when he hears something that excites him.

Anyway, who says dogs don’t smile? That is the only thing they do when they feel good.

And an important and good difference between people and dogs is that you are not likely to ever find a dog with a rictus grimace.

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BOUQUET

Then Tantalus took the grapes and drank the water

in the world where everything is forgiven.

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He is getting ready to leave, looking around for all the little things you cannot leave the apartment without. He repeats like a mantra keys, phone, money and turns the TV off. Once again, he realizes that the overly loud TV voice was the thing that unsettled him and made him anxious. He felt like he had to compete the entire morning in his apartment, adjusting to that voice and doing his stuff parallel to it, instead of having simply turned it off. People sometimes forget that they have power over the objects surrounding them.

Having checked whether he had turned everything off, he sets off for his father’s place where they are supposed to have lunch. It was both a routine and at the same time anything but. They both liked to eat fine food, to prepare a rump steak, sauté or tripe for one another, to prove who is better at preparing steak tartar, who is more in touch with popular sauces and culinary combinations, can tell the difference between radicchio and endives, and who is actually the impeccable keeper of the atavistic hunting ancestors’ habits, yet still knows perfectly well how many minutes are needed to cook a cutlet just right to correspond to the needs of a European body and just raw enough to exhilarate a barbaric palate.

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