The Collector of Negative Spaces
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
On the third shelf of her bookcase, carefully arranged between two unreadable volumes of German philosophy, Maria kept her collection of missing moments. They looked like nothing at all—tiny spheres of perfect vacuum sealed in glass jars labeled only with dates and times. 3:47 PM, October 12th, 2019. 11:03 AM, April 3rd, 2020. The day she learned to steal them from ordinary conversations, she stopped wearing her watch. Timekeeping had become obsolete once she understood how to harvest its empty spaces. 4:39 PM, May 30th, 2020 Maria’s mind slowed to a crawl as she lined up the jars and hovered the spoopy plastic hand over the hourglass. It was a Tuesday, exactly three months since April 3rd.
In the next room, still with chocolates on her face, Violet slept fitfully. A fine sheen of dried saliva covered the precise details of her frightened face.
Maria pushed her spoon through a honey-coated mound of gummy bears. 4:33 PM. She wished she could just suck the moments directly into her mouth. She had always liked the way the past crunched between her teeth and the way teeth filled with meal stuck to each other in perfect puffs of grit.
The honey held something indistinct between the walls of its sticky tubes, something slow-winking and smooth-slick. 4:30 Maria tasted it on her tongue.
Outside, in her neighbor’s backyard, a bird sang.
Her watch was gone. Only the jeweler knew what Violet had done with it, and he was dead.
4:24 PM, OLGOTOTS
There was another jar of moments Oleander had collected, Maria realized. “Of course there is,” she said. She swallowed the last of the honey and clinked the spoon against the glass of jar 3:14 PM. Everything closed at 7:14 PM. Everyone should be in their own homes with every single other person at exactly 7:14 PM. Were all the houses next to hers empty right now or just hers? And what was the endgame here? Is that what this is all about? August grinned, tipped his hat, and said, “You finally got it just now, you know.”
Every moment belonged to Oleander. Traipsed through each one, leaving tracks of gelatin and kissing the mutated king of yellow and red.
Time disproved Maria’s hypothesis: differentials were not filled by anything other than time.
The jar resisted, clung to Maria’s breath. Cold. 4:00 PM, May 19th, 2020.
Around the jar’s neck was Oleander’s final notice: A-milelest you-bestreets.
There was no turning back even if she wanted to. It was Oleander’s revenge, precisely timed.
This is not an interruption.
“It won’t come out,” Maria said. Her lips were a psychedelic smear of melting sk◆ About the ending
❧ About the title