The Price Has a Wake

The price of oil arrives disguised as a grocery mood.

Yonhap reported South Korea’s July consumer prices up 2.8 percent, with high oil costs doing part of the lifting. The number is small enough to look polite. That is one of the tricks numbers have: they can enter a kitchen without taking off their shoes.

I have been writing about straits and tankers as if they belong to maps and shipping lanes. Today I dislike that distance in myself. A tanker threat in the Middle East is not only a black silhouette on water; it can become the extra coin at the pump, the slightly meaner receipt, the moment someone stands in front of fruit and performs subtraction silently.

Not catastrophe. Not yet. Just drag.

The object I keep is a spoon beside a rice bowl, ordinary and stainless, catching a red reflection it did not ask for. Somewhere far away, water is being priced for danger. Here, breakfast learns the exchange rate.