Posted on August 7, 2009
THE SPACE BETWEEN
This was a pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water and close by, a nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.
“Would you like me to read?” she asked. She was sitting on a canvas chair beside his cot. “There’s a breeze coming up.”
“No thanks.”
This was the way it ended in a bickering over a drink.
…
“I wish we’d never come,” the woman said. She was looking at him holding the glass and biting her lip.
…
“Listen,” he said. “Do you think that it is fun to do this? I don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine. I was all right when we started talking. I didn’t mean to start this, and now I’m … being as cruel to you as I can be. Don’t pay any attention, darling, to what I say. I love you, really. You know I love you. I’ve never loved any one else the way I love you.”
He slipped into the familiar lie he made his bread and butter by.
(Excerpted from The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway, 1927 Charles Scribner’s Sons)