"Bubbles over a drowned man."

"What?"

A triangular fingernail slid with a quick glissando over the swollen spines gazing down at us from the bookshelf.

"Plunge into a pool headfirst and your breath will rise to the surface in bubbles: swell and burst."

The speaker again surveyed the rows of silent books crowded along the walls.

"You'll say that even a bubble can catch the sun, the blue of the sky, the green curve of a coastline. Maybe so. But does that matter to the man whose mouth is grazing the bottom?"

-Sigmund Krzhizhanovsky