The Dictionary of Failed Translations
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The dictionary on her desk had seventeen words for different kinds of longing, none of them exactly right for what she felt when she saw photographs of cities she'd never visited. She began adding her own definitions in the margins, using combinations of symbols borrowed from mathematics, music notation, and maps of vanished coastlines. Other words started appearing beside hers in handwriting she didn't recognize. Not translations. Something else entirely. Something that made her fingers buzz when she touched the page, like the paper itself was trying to speak through her skin. That was when she realized she was translating something other than words. She was charting typographies of human minds—a circle S engraved in the dictionary's cover, open, coating her palms like a sheet of amber puzzle pieces. She liked it when words got stuck inside each other. This one. This is love.
She held her list to the doorway and passed a point where a gray grackle was ashine, a type of saltwater fish from a foreign season never meant to swim in light. Most of the things she'd written were too personal or too strange for papers or front steps, so she had gotten herself a private zip-code in Ile Bun (just above the USA, where thirds of the globe fell in-between rail lines scribbled on maps for musicians who were never asked to play the instruments) and a phone number with an ambiguous prefix that never registered calls.
From time to time the phone rings anyway. Usually she ignores it or throws the book at it, then makes something new out of its paper, tiny facts and questions and things she thinks her gestures will fulfill. Animations now comprising the world. Tomorrow she might clip pieces of other dictionary pages◆ About the ending
❧ About the title