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THE ESSAY ALCHEMIST
Here is the pot: a screen of light carefully arranged to show words black-on-white.
Here are the ingredients:
Alphabets pour tap-tapping in, consonants and vowels and punctuation marks swill together, mingling like ouroborean inks. The tail of an apostrophe curls with a lover's grace into the open fold of a 'c'. A hungry 'u' devours a cluster of lost commas.
Take up a knife, make an incision; a drill, make a hole; a small scoop, remove just the right amount. Five grams, say the experts. Any more and there might be damage. Any less and the concoction will sag, lacking that crucial element. In it falls, a grey lump at first until the heat makes it melt, and in strings of intellect it is mixed.
Books make mountains beside the alchemist's pot, speckled with post-it notes like trees. A page is selected, a choice phrase. Carefully excised, lowered in, they intersperse with the rest like lamp-light on a dark street.
A hefty sprinkle of the mechanical herb, time, is required for fullness of flavour. The alchemist grows it in a terra-cotta jar by his window. In sunlight the angled limbs shine metallic, the thin buds of second-hands growing from sturdier minute-hands that in turn branch off from the old hour-hands.
That final ingredient, that naughty ingredient, chocolate-sweet or coffee-strong, ribbons the mixture with delectable delight.
The alchemist stirs with cables and mice, he watches the broth bubble and steam. The hot product-clouds rise, are caught by an upturned funnel, channelled through the twisting glass intestines of the alchemist's laboratory. This impurity is extracted, that flaw is pasted into the waste beaker.
In the final chamber it curls, trapped, and with a flick of his wrist the alchemist turns the tap. Ground-cold water creaks from it at first, then gushes, cooling the glass so suddenly that the alchemist knows eventually it will crack and break and he will have to buy another. No matter. That is another day. Here, now, his labour is condensing, droplet by word-droplet, plopping down onto the paper-flat bottom of the chamber, lines of black-on-white carefully arranging themselves.
And ah! he sighs, gladdened. He sits, smoking a pipe, and watches the completed piece tidy into shape.
Alex Dally MacFarlane has been writing ever since the discovery of computer games made her think that if stories could be found on a 32-bit cartridge, why not in the mind of an eleven-year-old girl? Now she has a BA in War Studies and History from King's College London and works just outside London, proof-reading military specifications. Her short fiction has sold to magazines including Shimmer, Sybil's Garage and Farrago's Wainscot and to the Sporty Spec anthology from Raven Electrick Ink, and her poetry is in this month's issues of The Pedestal Magazine and Goblin Fruit. She recently guest-edited The Five Senses issue of Behind the Wainscot. You can find her on Livejournal as Alankria.
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