Agnessa And Juan //top\\ Direct

Last night, a storm knocked out the power. They sat on the porch, listening to the river rise. Juan lit a candle and placed it between them. The flame flickered. Agnessa reached across and took his hand. She did not say I love you . She never says that. Instead, she said, "If we left tomorrow, where would we go?"

They stayed in the salt flats for another week, sleeping in the truck, arguing about everything—whether a line could be curved, whether memory was a kind of map, whether the puma was worth the detour (it was; the puma turned out to be a taxidermy fox with a wig). Juan taught her to dance the zamba. Agnessa taught him to calculate fuel efficiency in liters per hundred kilometers. Neither of them learned anything from the other, except patience. agnessa and juan

"And yet," Juan replied, "here we are."