An elderly couple, with walking sticks, lean on each other as they walk. They got out of their car at a gas station, and, dependent on each other in their mutual support, they went inside to buy a sack of ice. Ice is something you can’t do without in the desert. But what are such old people doing in the desert at the very end of their lives? Of all places in the world? A desert? With their sticks, leaning on each other, they inch forward together, step by step.

I’m reading in the desert. I bought this book after I heard that it contained a story by an acquaintance of mine. It’s a book of very short stories, which they call here flash fiction because of their striking brevity. The contents state that the story is on page 43. But when I opened the book, the story was not there, my acquaintance was not in the book, only in the table of contents. There is no page 43 in the book, page 42 continues on page 44 and so on. I wanted to exchange my copy of the book (with the error) for a correct one, but in the bookshop it turned out that there was no page 43 in any copies of the book. A book with a vanished story, an anthology with a vanished author.

But everything I read in the desert lacks weight. The desert silence drowns out our sentences. And I think about the fact that our writing was flawed, because we were in a hurry to transpose into words an event in which Something happened, whereas over and over again we should have been describing a state in which Nothing happens.