“Give me a spot of yours,” Matilda begged Eliza. She didn’t just spread it in her bustle, but inside herself and on her legs too. It tricked Madame Flora this time.
Victoria was left alone, except for the picture Hugh Louise had left behind.
I’ll be in and out of here for the rest of my life, Victoria thought, I’ll be stopping and starting my flowers, I’ll be spitting up Madame Flora’s, I can settle here forever with the parlour wives. There were left over Madame Flora bottles all over the room. She poured the contents of them into the toilet, without flushing, and giggled as she did so. She then sat on one of the beds, and opened a magazine. On the cover was a woman using a telephone, her spare hand sitting atop a bouquet of roses.
Government Slots
Omar El Akkad
Three brown dahlias, pressed and dried
A photograph of a meadow in spring
A compass
In the morning, just after we open, an old woman comes in. She stands in line—there’s always a line, though never a long one—and passes through the metal detector without setting it off. It’s Christmas Day and we are, as far as I can tell, the only state or federal building open. We’re open every day. You never know.
The old woman makes her way past security and over to the ticket spitter. She takes a number and sits down on one of the grey plastic chairs bolted to the floor. She waits until a man at one of the inspection desks calls her number, then she stands, removes her paperwork from her handbag, and shuffles over. Without speaking, the man takes her papers—identification, social security, proof of ownership. He looks through them, disinterested. The old woman waits.
Finally, the inspector sets the papers aside. From a desk drawer he retrieves a blank deposit form.
All right, he says, let’s see what you got.
The woman reaches into her purse and pulls out a small sandwich bag full of cloud-white fur. She slides it across the table.
The inspector picks up the bag, cautious, with the tips of his thumb and index finger. He stares at it as a jogger might stare at roadkill, repulsed but not repelled, curious about the insides of things.
A dog? the inspector asks.
Bichon frisé, the old woman replies.
That’s a dog?
Yes.
The inspector starts to say something, then sighs and waves to one of his colleagues at the next desk. His colleague comes over, and he, too, picks up the bag, turns it over in his hand, holds it against the light.
Dog fur, the inspector says. His colleague nods, then shakes his head.
Not allowed, he says. Nothing perishable, nothing alive.
This isn’t perishable, the old woman replies. This isn’t alive.
Both inspectors look at each other, and when one shrugs and shakes his head again, the other does the same. Sorry, they both say, almost in unison.
This is usually the point where there’d be a fight, when the customer would demand to see a manager or start threatening lawsuits. Sometimes security gets involved. Sometimes things get undignified.
But the old woman does none of this. Carefully she puts the bag of fur back in her handbag and walks away.
Look, if you want you can go around to the office and ask for an exemption, one of the inspectors says to the old woman as she leaves. But she doesn’t turn, doesn’t acknowledge him. He looks ashamed and annoyed to feel ashamed, the way all men do when they’re forced to look at the underside of their boots.
The old woman leaves. I watch her disappear into the blue December light. Then I go back to mopping. It’s important we keep the floors clean at the government slots. People get upset if the floors aren’t clean.
An endorsement letter, signed by a cardinal
A miniature compendium of prayers for the dead
A pack of condoms
You’re taught in school that it was an oil speculator who found it. Somewhere out in southwest Arizona, where now they’ve got a museum and a gift shop but you can’t get within ten miles of the mine itself without written permission and an armed escort. In winter the wrens swirl around the place, little black dollops of life against the endless flush-red land.
It was an accident. The speculator was busy tearing the ground open with dynamite and pressure pumps. One day the dust clears and what he sees at the bottom of the crater is this purple-grey metal, shards of it everywhere. It’s softer than it looks, but not malleable by hand. It’s light but not too light.
He doesn’t know what to make of it, what value it might have. He takes a sample to a friend of his, a physicist and metallurgical engineer. He leaves it with her for a few days and when he comes back she’s still staring at it, dumbfounded. He asks her what it’s made of and she says nothing anyone’s ever seen before. It’s a new square on the periodic table, the insides of its atoms at once indecipherable and coherent.
For years there’s great excitement, mostly in academic circles. There’s a naming ceremony, a slew of papers published in Nature and Science. But what the speculator wants is a commercial use, and for a long time there is none. Save for its novelty it offers nothing. Slowly interest fades, even among researchers, and eventually it’s only the metallurgical engineer who still dedicates herself to studying the metal.
For the most part, her work comes to nothing. But one experiment yields unexpected results. The metal’s fundamental physical properties change when it’s made to form an enclosure, a closed space. From this finding, the engineer develops a theory about containment. She posits that a space enclosed by this metal has properties of superposition, and in this way there’s a place to which anything enclosed this way might travel—a distant but interlocked point on the other side of the universe perhaps, or another universe altogether. She builds a small airtight box and as an homage to her favourite physicist she places a cat’s collar inside. At first she checks on it hourly, then daily, then once a month. She tries running a current through it, tries raising and lowering the temperature. She tests the metal’s reaction to organic matter; she smears it with drops of her own blood. She subjects the thing to pressure, stress, violence. She almost burns her lab to the ground, trying.
Eventually, within certain academic circles, the engineer becomes a laughingstock of sorts, her name a shorthand for futility. She retreats from the world. The cat’s collar sits in the box for years, untouched.
Decades later, on her deathbed, she exhales for a last time and in that moment the friends and family assembled by her side hear a loud crumpling from her hallway closet, a sound like a hundred bones snapping at once. When they check the closet they find the box, collapsed in on itself. They pry it open and find it empty.
Hearing of this, the speculator remembers his friend’s old theory about the metal as a conduit of passage. He is by now nearing death himself, a prosperous but strangely unfulfilling life behind him. He commissions the building of a similar box for himself and all the staff at his mining company. He marks his with a drop of blood, asks his staff to do the same. Some do. Many refuse. He places a pocket Bible in his box. He keeps it by his bedside, and at the moment of his death, there comes the same crumpling. The Bible inside disappears.
From such smallness a universe is formed.
Three chocolate chip cookies, smuggled
A small plush unicorn, its horn half-severed