Circuitry

Short fiction contest: first place winner

You’re a mathematician and I’m the stubborn biologist who refuses to count the world to your series of algorithms. Sure, you take a tree and determine a fractal iteration and sure, I can map and define the physiology of your sinus cavity to the cellular structure.

But when it comes down to it, you view me as a collection of qubits and I view you as an ecological process in pinpoint geologic time.

This little house, we constructed in our early days when you used to sleep in the afternoons with the apartment blinds shut. Your mother was foreboding, and, well, your coping skills were too derivative to serve you well. Hopes are asymptotic, you kept telling me, but hey, isn’t that how it goes? I worried, Leo — and you tried, you did, but as much as you want, you can’t map the tangential curve of a heart, especially your own. You need someone else to open its structure and examine the cordae tendonae, smell the weakness in the papillary muscles, teach you to learn to accept that your heart exists the way it is in all of its perfection, but it also needs some work. I am no architect, Leo. I am just your lover-boy.

But I drew that blueprint for us, for you. I drew the lines of our future bedroom when you slept (even when my hands resisted) and in return you kept on breathing in the wet darkness.

And now everything’s switched again, but in different binaries.

Isn’t that how it goes? Sure, it may be me lying on the couch like muddled jelly when you come home, and sure, my meals may have dwindled into fucked approximations of themselves, but give me time and a cleaner microscope lens to view my brain and in return, I’ll take my own advice and search the neural pathways of my mind for a solution to your equation.

Iterate me. Find my code. Use your calculus to set up a scaffold, a projection of my mental framework. This house is what I built for you in the real world, the one you can touch and feel. Can you take my ideas and formulate a beautiful proof as perfect and as true as the way you butter my toast in the morning?

I may be a collection of cells lying on this bed with you, and you may be a series of manifolds held within a brain, but together we fill this room, a place in our lives, the Tupperware containers of our dreams.

We’ll take our circuitry, in all it’s complexity, and map it out in duplicate like a blueprint. And when it’s all written down, superimposed, laid out in front of us, we’ll take this map and find all the misconnections.

There, you might say. A linear regression.

There, I might say. A neural fibrillation.

Tags

Contest, Fiction, Short

All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s)-in-Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Skip to content