The Metaphor Warehouse at the Edge of Becoming
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
Mira discovered her condition at age seven, when she spent an entire game of hide-and-seek counting to infinity between the numbers 99 and 100. Her parents found her half an hour later, still standing in the hallway, perfectly visible yet somehow impossible to see directly, like trying to look at the space where your own nose should be in your field of vision. The doctors called it "temporal dislocation syndrome" and prescribed vitamins. Her grandmother called it "having one foot in the threshold" and taught her how to tie her shoes with knots that would never quite come undone. These days Mira works an overnight shift at the Metaphor Warehouse. She makes more than she did at UBells: an actual living wage with no crippling debt hanging over her head when she wakes up. She is supposed to fill orders for descriptions, adjectives that will help metaphors sail from pseduo-prose to otherworldly incandescence. So there are boxes of tragedy, and boxes of rage, and cloud-filled boxes full of condensed happiness frozen in time. There are rainbow boxes labeled "Love" neatly stacked on their sides, although there used to be scientists who believed that true love was actually blue. There are jars of experience filled with any number of scents. There are also jars of feeling, with no label, because what do you do when your order isn't made out so neatly? You try to find a nearby box, than hope that person has inserted a caution tape label over the safety icon. Otherwise, your fingers may touch a half-payment of life experience that is charged with so much financial interest you can't afford to let your sanity make contact with it. It is only when someone is in shock or on the verge of screaming that they can't feel anything - because body heat makes a chemical change in the jar. If you shatter the rules and transport it directly from the slower than light warehouse to the faster than sound human world, its scent is non-existent because non-resonance. Every once in a while, when the gods have agreed to take pity, you will see someone with no jar. They string words through the air with wires except they are as direct as light. They can think anything into existence; they can feel anything by loving what is. They are never afraid of soulless. Sometimes they do not trust that love is still wet from the womb, and what is colder, more verklempt, than a newborn? They speak the secret code of warning: "choose your words with your love and only your love. Otherwise, I shall go to grab my jar, and when I feel, you will go blind!" Mira has never seen a jarless person before. She has read about them. They grace the cover of Time every once in a while. They publish their wedding albums in Vanity Fair. They are smart: Philosophy is a subject they teach in high schools, not university. But they are not sane, because who can understand the language of the gods without the proper textbook and scientific education? Mira remembers her grandmother saying things like "they choose their universe of experience" and "not everybody knows how to leave the home they come from." Now Mira is about to find out. Mira dumps a handful of promise into a jar labelled in wispio-whispers. The lid sticks despite gentle tapping, so Mira breaks it in her rage. Her fist sinks into the glass and she finds the golden key she didn't even know was there. She inserts it into the new opening and threads it through the contents. Never far away is Daniel, who seems to be the only person who loves her. He wears all of his heart on his sleeve - as though he needs to be revival's proof that it exists. Yes, he has brought the mop and bucket in front of her workplace. No, he is not jealous. No, he does not think she is cheating on him with logic: they are loyal because they do not want a heart-declaration to become just a foolish story. Mira feels something weird in her gut, like it's opened up to a windowless basement and thought, oh that's where the skeletons came from. The emptiness. The bad jokes. If only it could have always been this way. If only they could stay inside and be in love forever, as long as they were there with each other. Then it's her turn to hand Daniel a bucket and a mop, but when she removes the lid to the glass jar after filling it she finds that its contents look like another world. It's like looking at half of truth. It's like trying to de-construct a glass bottle after having searching it: the absence of where capsules of flavor were not. How to decide◆ About the ending
❧ About the title