Paul Hostovsky Hospital Gift Shop I come here looking for something for you among the colorful breakable things presided over by an elderly volunteer who looks up brightly from her book, then goes back to reading as I sniff around for something like food—not food but something like food to take upstairs to you, something pithy and buoyant and wooden and old like a good walking stick, a long stout pole with a beautiful twist at the end for carrying around when walking in quicksand country—I want to ask the woman reading if she carries something like that. Who knows, maybe she keeps it stashed away in a box on a top shelf in the back like hope. But I don't ask. Instead I finger the spines of the paperbacks, looking for a book for you that isn't here, or anywhere—a book whose old, damp, faintly sweet bad-tooth breath you smell when you open its crackling stained pages and read that death is benign as a library fine waived by a beautiful Librarian who asks you if the story of the body pleased, then asks you if you'd like to exchange it for another story or give the stories up. Give up all the stories. I want to ask the woman reading if she carries such a book. But I don't ask. Instead I give you the woman in the gift shop quietly reading.

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