For a time, Sherry was the only girl available at the Honey Route. The regulars weren’t spending so freely, and it was down to guys who stopped by, passing custom, the kind who, once they’d come in and gotten a beer in hand weren’t going to blink. Every Monday a trucker named Clark, the liquor delivery guy, called in. A while back he’d said to her, It wouldn’t take you a minute to pack your bag — it isn’t as if you’ve got much stuff — and you could come away in the truck with me. The delivery drivers do their rounds before dawn, and so the sun still hadn’t come up when Sherry put her bag in the truck, while Clark cracked open a beer. He started telling her about a friend of his, an Argentine who worked in a club in Las Vegas, and, Las Vegas being pornstar central, he’d be sure to find her some work, they’d inquire. He felt the impulse to kiss her just at that moment, for the first time, but didn’t. Sherry had been up the whole night and went through into the back of the cab to lie down, picking up a book she found among the beer cans and skimming before putting it to one side again, of all the books I have had printed none is, I believe, as personal as this collective and disorderly compilation. J. L. Borges. Buenos Aires, 31 October 1960. The sun was up by now and Clark opened another beer and handed it to Sherry, followed by another and another, until they were on to their eighth, at which point they stopped for a rest, pulling up next to a poplar covered in shoes. Sherry had heard a lot of talk about the tree, and of the supposedly extraterrestrial origin of some marks on the shady side of the tree at dawn, but she’d never seen it for herself. Maybe all the shoes are an offering to the aliens, said Sherry, hopping down from the cab.
Augustín Fernández Mallo, Nocilla Dream
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