This is what I found by chance tonight.

I stood in front of a bookshelf I had long forgotten in my hallway. Mostly verb conjugation books, a handful of really decent novels with which I can't part, a large collection of old magazines, mostly National Geographics bought from the library and Southwestern Quarterlies. I picked up a random book of short stories.

I sat down in the living room and opened the book. Two leaves fell out.
This is one of them. Dried from at least two years ago. It was a habit I had for a time. Still do, although less so.



Here is the nearest passage. This is what I was meant to find tonight.

The storyteller had something to do with this feeling, he was not sure what; but surely it was a feeling that had first come to him from the man; it seemed to be in the command of the man, it seemed called up in him by the man's very presence [...]

[T]he seduction of the storyteller, the surrender of listener to teller, almost in a kind of love-making, of sensual possession [...] A dark new life had started under the command and the hot spell of the stories that boiled like steam, tolled like a bell, sang like a solemn singer's song out of his mouth.