Predictable

Are you exploring enough? Be honest.

You’ve been exploiting again, haven’t you. You’ve been working the same reliable vein of coal that’s kept the boiler fed for years.

Have you really resigned yourself to never step outside the mine again? You know it isn’t going to last forever. At some point the roof will cave in or the rains will flood you out. Either your work will be your undoing or your blind trust will.

Shouldn’t you try to look for some firewood? Are you still scared witless by the thought of capturing some heat from the sun?

Yes, it might be dimmer than it used to be, but it’s still on in the day and off at night. Not quite bright enough to give you a burn, not enough to fire up the old wheeled beasts, but maybe enough to dry your clothes, if you’re patient. Not everything has to smell like coal tar and ash.

Do you remember when you first found the mine shaft? You weren’t even looking for it. You tripped over the guardrail and fell six feet below, arms covered in mud. It wasn’t what you meant to find, but it worked out for you.

Like the fountain pen. It was always about getting the edge cases. You had to bend the tines, run it dry, flip it five-eighths of a turn, drown it in ink and scythe it across the paper backwards, skitter-scatter, loud enough to irk anyone with a sense of pride in their writing implements. You wanted to show its designers how many times you could kill it and bring it back, bend the tines till they touched, splay them till they went plastic. You hunted, not for a happy medium, but for the edges.

You traced those edges like a blade. Serrated, plain, jigsaw, burr, ragged spiral, whisk, it didn’t matter. You would find the shape. You would trace the shape, refining it, more like mercury than gold, until there were no secrets left to it – until every bone and tendon in its wings was mapped, relaxed, and solved, defining an outer surface, every parameter known and every deficiency accounted for.

What happened here, then? Did you try to trace too many shapes, too many dimensions, memory overflowed, system latched up, write protect engaged and brain dis? Where went that cheeky friend of mine?

Was it the lead and antimony dust from the coal – did that kill your dendrites, sneakily, crawling into your lungs and bloodstream only after luring you in, the promise of cheap warmth from the fog, tricking you into exhausting your air filters, leaping through your open throat?

Or did you choose this?