This story is intended to be a sort of Rorschach, if you will. Read it and interpret it and your interpretation might help you understand your unconscious. Or not.

They stood out in the open, looking up at the battle in the sky.

“You afraid of dying?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, although he was lying. She knew that he was lying, and he knew that she knew that he was lying.

Then she said, “I’m scared.”

The easy manner in which she said it and snuggled into his arms belied her words and he knew that she was lying too. Her lie made him feel even more fearful but he could not reveal that to her, and so he held her in his arms for a while as they listened to the sounds of distant explosions.

Then a bomb exploded ahead of them, close enough that they fell back into ground, rolling on the grass, until they came to a stop. They were lying in a dale, and neither of them said a word. After a while, the sounds of battle stopped.

“So we are alive,” she said and stood up first, giving him a hand.

He held it but instead of standing up, he pulled her down, seized by an urge to assert his greater physical strength.

She fell down and began laughing and he looked up at her, his eyes squinting because of the sun.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Everything,” she said. “We are alive, the bombing has stopped, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and look at those birds!”

She pointed to a flock of birds that turned and swooped high above them. He suddenly felt dizzy as he watched them and had to look down. She was now looking in the direction of the lake.

“You are not thinking of…”

“No,” she said. And then she added, “But won’t it be nice to get into that cool water?”

She wasn’t asking him of course, as much as waiting for her words to work their magic. He knew already that he and she would jump into the lake soon, but he wanted to postpone it for a while longer, for as long as he possibly could.

“We Don’t Know”. Intriguing name for a restaurant. “What don’t you know?” I asked the waiter.

He smiled in what I think was supposed to be an enigmatic manner. “We don’t know anything, Sir.”

“Ok,” I said. I was starving. “Can I get the menu please?”

He gave me a large leather bound menu. Except there was no menu. Just a piece of paper with numbers from 1 to 10, arranged vertically.

“Excuse me, what are these numbers? Can you get me the regular menu?”

“This is the regular menu, Sir.”

“How do I order the food? What do these numbers mean?”

“This is how it works, Sir. You pick a number, I enter it into the system and the computer tells me what to get you.”

“So you don’t know what I am going to get until you put the number into the system?”

“Right, it’s completely random.”

“Huh.” I looked at the menu again. $20 each, 10 numbers. What was I going to get? I looked to my left - a man enjoying a platter of sushi.

On my right, a couple sharing what looked like chargrilled prawns on a bed of rice. This could be interesting, the surprise element. Not exactly my thing, but I could do it.

“Get me a…hmmm…let me see…Get me a 4.” Ten minutes later, he brought me my order.

“Are you serious?”

“Sorry sir, that’s what you got for 4. You want to try again?”

I stared at the diet coke. “What the hell. Get me a number 2 and a number 6.”