Fiction | January 08, 2024

The Fourth State of Water

Everyone           some moment in their life 

will need dark field  

to recognize the peculiar shapes of their own tear 

“The Crystallization of Tears,” Ruth Padel 

I can still feel Fritz’s hair in my hands, though it’s hours later and I’m dressed and awake and in the kitchen now. Does he still have any, I wonder? The question is what my hands were doing in it—tearing at fine short hanks, making hairless a piece of scalp the size of a two-shilling piece. Because it was a memory, not a dream. I have no doubt about that.  

I’m tempted to forget the whole damn thing. 

Some people have memories like bogs, full of sucking mud. Not me. Even now, at eighty-five, the question is still: how to move forward? What’s the next step? The hair memory, however, is a mystery. And mysteries, I believe, in science and in life, must be solved.