The Contagious Geography of Unbecoming
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The forgetting district smelled like cinnamon and ozone, always burning out the edges of things. Elena walked its perimeter daily, careful not to breathe too deeply, her thoughts wrapped in layers of nursery rhymes and grocery lists—fragile insulation against the encroaching erasure. Today, though, something had changed. The boundary markers were singing in a key she almost recognized, and the air tasted of copper pennies and her grandmother's final words. She stepped across without meaning to, her protective mantras dissolving like sugar in rain, and knew immediately that she was pregnant with someone else's memories. Someone else's books were flowering across her armpits, black curls sprouting from beneath her feet, and she could suddenly smell cinnamon, see mercury rising in the glassy, filmy surface of the sea. She was learning abilities not her own, being reborn into a personality that wasn't her own, slipping inside Nicodemus's body to be reborn as Nicodemus's other. Elena found her reflection in the peeling mirror of a lock shop. The mother of nature, the weary land of sleep, the forgetting district, whatever she was in the moment, it was no longer her own.
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