My chair is falling apart. The leather of the seat. This morning I found a strip of fabric on the floor. Maybe two inches by an inch. But the chair is good otherwise. Comfortable, or at least comfortable enough. And I’ve had it for years. It’s like a member of the family. Well, not really, but you know...

Beneath the leather seat is stuffing. Probably not as much as once upon a time. I cover the seat with a cloth towel. That, you would think, would protect the leather.

So I took a picture of the strip of leather along with a little screw I found somewhere sometime who knows when. I keep it on my desk, for no particular reason. No, I don’t think the screw will be useful in mending the chair. The screw comes from out of doors—that I remember, sort of.

When doing my three-mile runs around the neighborhood, I sometimes pick up abandoned bits of this and that, such as the screw. Just yesterday I picked up a race car. Not a real race car, of course, but a lost toy, a Hot Wheels.

I put it in the pocket of my running shorts. This happened within the first mile of my run, and I remembered a piece of metal I’d seen for several weeks in a crack in the street right near the curb at about the two mile mark, which is right around the corner near the highway. This metal is shiny and thin and L-shaped. About an inch on one arm and two inches on the other. I think it’s a kind of wrench. As long as I’d picked up the race car, I thought I might as well pick up the wrench. But when I rounded the highway corner the wrench thing wasn’t there. I was disappointed. You can’t have every thing. As I finished my run I thought about one of my favorite photographs—the one by Walker Evans of the wrench.

Back home I stripped off my running shirt and kicked off my shoes. That’s when I noticed the strip of leather on the floor. I picked it up and put it on the towel along with the little screw and took the picture. I think it came out pretty good.

I showed it to Mary. “Oh,” she said, “that’s really...” She studied the picture for a while without saying anything. “I like it,” she concluded. “My favorite part might be the edge of the towel. The soft little frizzles. But I really like the way the point of the screw almost touches the black skin thing. Like a kiss.” She looked at the picture more. “You know what?” Mary asked. She knelt between my legs. She pulled down my jogging pants.

She studied my penis reverently for a few seconds, watching it lift and fatten, and then she took it into her mouth.