(no subject)

[proximoception]

The first day I performed duties as torchbearer at our church I embarrassed myself trying to strike a match to light the candle. I was ten and had never had occasion to strike one before, as I was from a non-smoking family with a modern electric stove and no interest in mood lighting. After watching me fail six times my fellow bearer smirked, shook her head and struck hers neatly across the side of the box. Her smirk stayed on her face as she lit my candle, then hers, and the ghost of it was still on her mouth an hour into the service. After a few weeks of watching her do it, I felt I'd picked up the trick and tried again. It worked at once, and I was filled with joy - though after a moment I decided my motion could have been smoother, more confident. My partner frowned for the briefest of moments, but this was immediately replaced by a smirk of anticipation. She took the matchbook from me, did something with it between her fingertips I couldn't follow, and was suddenly swinging a match down toward the silver fingerbowl the priest did something pointless with during the lead-up to communion. The very tip of the match grazed the very surface of the water. Though my view was blocked briefly by her flapping robe sleeve, I heard the matchhead rip into full flame across its upswing. The tiniest quivering ripple proved it had in fact touched the water. She smirked now a smirk of achievement. She shook it out.

I of course demanded at once how she'd done it. She explained solemnly that it wasn't a magic trick but instead simple science. In every matchbook a small circle of foil has been placed inside the cardboard at a secret spot. Pushing the head of the match against this slightly denser surface at an angle and twirling it briefly causes its red molecules, which are all shaped like Chinese restaurant soup spoons, to stack neatly. A denser surface, such as that of the sandpaper on the side of the box, would of course cause the head to catch, by pushing the spoons not just against but through one another, breaking them into sharp bits that would then slice into the water balloon-like oxygen molecules in the surrounding air, the freed juices of which clog the pores of the adjacent carbon kibbles, slowing their spin enough to immediately free the spirit of fire suffusing all matter that only hypnotically regular motion of a certain kind prevents from devouring the universe. Which is of course exactly what happens to the neatly-stacked spoon molecules when the prepared match head strikes even the most yielding of surfaces.

Thus was I first brought into contact with secret information. Later that day she took me to meet the others. There were four of them in the treehouse. They taught me much, but at a price. The price of enduring their scorn. While instructing me they raised their eyebrows, dug their dimples, flashed underbites, threw their voice back over their shoulder while looking elwsehere, stretched as though about to get into or out of bed, shook their clavicles in light continuous laughter. And their tones! They could only explain in high-pitched disbelief at how little I knew, sniffy puckered glee at the absurdly wide gap between my assumptions and what was so, low and languid condescension to my over-intense interest in a world they'd so thoroughly and long ago mastered they barely remembered it was there.

They taught me where the switch in every tree hole that determines if the tree's coniferous is. They taught me the four contentless symbols that come in between numbers and letters, after which you realize those are all the same thing. I learned how to walk much faster by taking a small extra step in the middle of every stride. I learned how not washing your hair makes it cleaner. I found out every mirror at the mall hides a spotless bathroom, even the ones on pillars.

[Cont'd]