Bookshelves
The day they moved in together, he remarked upon how heavy and numerous were all her boxes of books.
He took that as an opportunity. That weekend, he left to visit his father. They went to a dusty lumberyard and bought enough wood for a fine pair of bookshelves. A programmer by trade, the son hadn’t seen a power tool since his early teens. Together, father and son mused over craft beer and dovetail joints.
Meanwhile, she took his remark as a complaint. Why, yes, she did have quite a number of books, and it had been forever since she’d read them. While he was gone, she found that the high-speed camera in her smartphone was fine enough to capture images and words of pages rifled quickly past the lenses. With the right software, and enough trial and error, she made short work of turning boxes into data and library donations.
He returned with bookshelves, but she returned without books. They both were sad, until they donned their glasses and painted code on the shelves that restored all the spines to view.