paper

There was that weird conversation I had with Brenda. She's been working for our organisation since a couple of years. We most often meet in the corridor, drink coffee and talk on the weather. Brenda is a Facebook maniac. I hesitate to tell this sort of thing, as I don't have a Facebook account myself. She does. 'There's no paper,' she said.
'What?'
'There's no paper.' She looked at me as if she expected me to take notice of the fact that there wasn't any paper. No what? Didn't her eyes gleam, with a dark and joyfull twist, like they always gleamed? Wouldn't she have looked at me with that very same gaze if I just for fun had tried out a newly bought Bermuda or jokingly said: 'Hi, Brenda, what's that shit on your face, honey?' I didn't wear any Bermuda and there was nothing strange about her face. I helped her with a coin. She took her coffee and while she did, standing with her back to me, I noticed, as I had noticed so many times before, how thin she was. She wore a, euh, jupon and for that very reason they had invented the word. She had it short, one and a half a mile above her knees.
'There's no what, Brenda?' I said, sure enough avoiding speculation on anything else but a definit answer. Weeks are boring. Selling houses, buying houses and that whole trade of destroying old ones to build new ones, I had been bored with that for more than just half an hour. I'm so bored with the damn shit, Brenda, but it wasn't precisely what I had intended to say. I didn't say it. It had been the least of my intention to say such a thing to Brenda. One and a half a mile above her knees a key could be turned but it most often turned the wrong direction. 'There's no paper,' she said, 'we need to buy some.'
'Oh, do we. I wouldn't,' I said. 'I never use it anyway.'
'What?' The expression on her face hadn't changed. Even nearly blind, she never would need glasses.
'Well, I said I never use it.'
'What?'
'Why I never use it is a good question,' I said. She didn't smile and she didn't look as if she wanted to hear anything more on the issue, so we closed the issue and drank our coffee. Through one of the windows, as I went to the bathroom, I noticed a dog on the pavement. Black, big and hairy. I stripped my pants down, sat, read some funny thing in a daily that someone had left in the cabin. Then I noticed that Brenda had been right, there wasn't any paper.