A closer look at the fluid inside the jar reveals that it is, in fact, alive. Magnetic ants have formed a colony within, and are living in extremely dense quarters, crawling all over each other’s bodies. It is difficult to discern at a glance where their tunnels end and the insects begin.
She’s going to wear all six of her faces tonight, and needs something that’ll pull them together. The cloud that emerges from her little black bottle isn’t exactly a vapor. Thousands of tiny knots in space-time erupt from its nozzle, clinging to her skin and bending the light around her wrists. No physical matter is involved in the formula; it’s all a trick of subjective geometry. At this point it is nothing more than the empty fragrance of a hypercube: a hollow presence which the nostrils can experience, yet cannot understand.
You remember Utah, and how the mountains were reflected in the pale mirror of the salt flats, and how the salt flats were reflected in the pale mirror of the sky, and how the road, with nowhere else to go, was reflected into itself. You remember exiting onto the lonely stretch of concrete and tar that was I-13 as you made your way towards Reno, sleepless and broiled, your own pulse visible in your peripheral vision.
There are chambers beneath the city where sound continues to exist without space in which to propagate. For most species, including human beings, these environments appear to be little more than solid walls of limestone and granite. For bats, however, these barriers are as permeable as the air they breathe. They dip in and out of the subterranean passages hidden beyond, preying upon the immaterial insects within.
She fills the filter cartridge with crushed cinnamon, then slides it under the boil-jet. The inverted kettle howls to life as vapor erupts from its exhaust system, mere seconds before water begins gushing through a Medusa’s wig of transparent pipes. The fluid slowly takes on a shade of burnt umber as the cinnamon concentrates inside, combining with milk and black honey in its coils. The final product trickles into her mug, still steaming from the heat of the machine’s galvanic wires.
Through rainfall, the dying hurricane entombs itself. The world below swallows what were once its clouds, beginning a process of transformation beyond human eyes. Eventually the weather above ground calms, but from the storm’s perspective, this is far from the end. Underground rivers become new arteries and reanimate its vaporous flesh, allowing mist and soil to merge into a new kind of sinew. After several weeks of gathering its bones back together, the storm returns to life in the depths of the planet.
During one particularly long winter, labyrinths began to break out in the metropolis like a civic disease. Every night, alleyways began to weave through one another, forming thick knots of concrete that blended with subway lines and decrepit telegraph tunnels. Brick and fiberglass curled into wild helices, and highways shed their skins like serpents to contribute to the tangle. By daylight, no evidence remained of these predatory mazes beyond the frozen bodies left behind by those who had been ensnared within.
“The clawfoot bathtub,” this book begins, “is a distant cousin of the crockpot and cauldron. Although its natural habitat is typically found outside the kitchen, it demonstrates a particular susceptibility to culinary magic due to its shape and composition. Being quadrupedal and wrought from relatively flexible materials, bringing one to life is often one of the most basic lessons taught to apprentice deep chefs.”