Sliver

[After too many hours in front of a laptop with headphones in....]

I watched a sliver of the sky through the coffee shop window around the corner in the wall and surmised that the sunset had been brilliant. Lingering in the slivered sky was the warm grapefruit hue at the horizon fading into cyan with altitude. I thought about the buses running a few minutes' walk from that window and people huddled at home around dinner tables with roast beef somewhere out there. In the meantime the cold pixels of a scientific manuscript stared at me, the lines advanced one by one with great effort, a record of human thought but not of human warmth or generosity. What was paper worth held up to mashed potatoes and shared laughter?