You meet at the strange tunnel connecting your worlds. You’re flesh and blood, they’re a cartoon. Your hobbies include golf and life drawing, theirs include wandering off cliffs and hovering in the air until they realise there’s no ground beneath them. You once broke a bone and had to stay in hospital for three weeks, they once had a grand piano fall on their head and walked away unharmed.
Both of you admit you could have moved past all this, because you want to bring different experiences to a relationship – but your love language is words of affirmation, while theirs is acts of service. You agree that it could never work. You part ways, wishing one another all the best, hoping that each of you might find your match, be it flesh, or animated, or something else entirely.
For years you recall the way they described the sensation of suddenly discovering there was no solid ground under their feet, and you wonder whether that’s what being in love feels like: like being a wacky little creature barely subject to physical laws. You wonder that until the day you die, hit by an anthropomorphic car that has been distracted by the scent of a delicious pie.
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A Quick Recommendation
This story by Christine Vines explores the consequences of an experiment that aims to split light, written almost like a recounted myth.
But one day, the device was finished. The papers warned: prepare yourselves, the Light will change. The people of Earth splintered again.
You can find the story, Before There Was Light, in BOMB Magazine.
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