4 posts tagged with "Borges-esque"

The legend of Anai did not begin with any specific event, but rather permeated the city air like a whisper, an unsettling consensus. She was a deaf-mute girl, a fact that might ordinarily elicit only pity or indifference. However, Anai possessed an unsettling, almost absolute perfection of features. This perfection was not beauty in the conventional sense, but a kind of harmony that transcended human aesthetic experience, as if it were a fragile, fleeting projection of "Beauty itself" from Plato's world of Forms.

That piece of news initially surfaced like a faint yet clear note in the background noise of the city, appearing in the torrent of notifications pushed to my phone screen: "Thank you to the brave female passenger on Beijing Subway Line 5." It possessed all the elements that grab attention instantly only to be quickly forgotten: a specific location (Subway Line 5), a vague protagonist (the brave female passenger), an event tinged with a moral halo (bravery), and a public gesture of gratitude. However, for me, this message did not dissipate as expected. It lingered, refusing to leave, like a metaphor, or a doorway leading into some dark labyrinth.

It was in the vast, sea-like archives of the Port Authority that I first noticed the ninety ships. Not because of their number—countless vessels ply the Pacific—but because of an almost perfect, unsettling symmetry. They numbered exactly ninety, no more, no less, forever maintaining this count like fixed pieces on a chessboard, traversing nearly identical routes from some colossal port in the East towards the distant West Coast of America. Then, with hardly a delay, they returned along another precisely calculated, slightly different course. Day after day, year after year.

By the time the violent tremor from the neighboring country reached our small border town, its force was already spent. The initial swaying was like a weary sigh. Chandeliers swung gently, dust drifting down from the bookshelves like the low murmurs of ancient times disturbed from their slumber. I, Chen, the town library's administrator, was engrossed in a fragmented scroll on ancient geomancy—said to foretell the mysterious connection between shifts in the earth's veins and the ebb and flow of human hearts. Outside the window, the sky was a strange, overly calm grey-blue, as if drained of all emotion before a storm.