The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

She broke off a piece from a candy bar and put it in your mouth while you sat in the high chair. As the stearate in the cocoa butter absorbed the heat from your mouth and melted over your tongue, complex alkaloids were released and seeped into your taste buds: twitchy caffeine, giddy phenethylamine, serotonic theobromine.

It was strange, what Yan and I shared. She wasn’t exactly a friend. More like someone who you couldn’t help being drawn to because you shared the knowledge of how the world didn’t work the way you had been told.

thought of writing to you because you remind me of myself. You thought you understood your soul, and you thought you knew how you needed to live your life. I thought you were wrong then, but I didn’t have the right answer myself. But now I do. I think you are ready for a state change.

ears, every bit of color in my eyes. My life was a clock running down. The months between my cigarettes were just dress rehearsals for the real performance, and I was engaged for twenty showings.

Amy was Rina’s roommate in college. She was the only person Rina ever pitied. Amy’s soul was a pack of cigarettes.

By the time she was done with all of the refrigerators, the apartment was filled with the bass chorus of all the motors, a low, confident hum that to Rina was the sound of safety.

this point, the process of mapping begins. Carefully, meticulously, a team of master cartographers—assisted by numerous apprentices—trace out each of the countless minuscule tributaries, impressions, and hunches that commingle into the flow and ebb of thought, until they gather into the tidal forces, the ideas that made their originators so great.

Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.

We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, i