There are spices interwoven among alive things and through them. Although they are rare they are there without apology everywhere. Things like lightning before thunder. Things like things the uncorked wine smelled like. Things like things he found while gathering rhubarb once. And this time he would have enough jar room to capture them.

He opened the bottle. At this point in his life he had run out of ideas and the air was slowly getting old. The rum he drank soured a long time ago and the arms he swung around were tired from all the seasons he’d seen. The murder rate had gone up again and there was another war. The car he’d bought used earlier that month was ok except for the brakes so the way he’d have to drive around almost required clairvoyance. So he’d been working out ways to keep himself alert during certain hours. But the rains were here and his mind falling out.

I thought I heard him say once that he went to a doctor who told him the voices on the radio were all in his head. And when he saw people changing the volume he had to convince himself they were doing something with its own significance that he would never quite understand.

The Oldsmith Company had a strange history. During the Civil War it produced binoculars made entirely out of glass. When the Wright brothers first flew Oldsmith began building airports on islands long before any flights above oceans were attempted or dreamed of. During prohibition they brewed up an entire liquor and medicine empire down in miles in the mines they had acquired from the federal government during the first Great War. Soon it was being said these medicines were making the blind see and the lame walk.

He wanted miracles and all he got were the near formless technologies Or came up with. Imprecise phenomena there was no other category for. Individual storage for particular molecule structures. These prisms somehow allowing for ultraviolet exist in vacuums (which broke every law of optics and generated a new previously unrecognized type of heat.) Organized antigravity horticulture. Escalators which could carry near celestial weights. Supersolid plastics permeable to only specifically programmed gases or liquids, at specifically programmed times in specific environments.

It was his job to market and sell things that couldn’t even be scientifically proven to exist.
Ideas are easy to make others salivate for but not if you can’t give them a flavor they have already tasted. At that time in history the rest of the world was still observing things using Newton and Einstein eyes.

Put the raw data next to something grateful for its presence near it. Put all the tools on the ground and pretend all you know is grace and symmetry.

The maze was easy but it was filled with extended doom. They left behind instructions to follow and little pills to for him to take. He always had to bring himself to swell up a certain courage to swallow these little reminders. He was better at blind faith for completely huge unknowns, like: what am I going to do in this new country, how am I going to survive in the future… rather than these little immediate tests every day.

Marcus, his boss, he only met a few times. When he saw him he was wearing a bandaid right in the middle of his forehead. He knew, through rumor, Marcus would inject some substance directly into his frontal lobe through that little hole right in the middle of right above between his eyes.

The adventure and the mystery. Murdered astronauts. Markets for thoughts. Ligers and Tapirs. Hundred year parties. Too out there to ever come back from.

There are territories where spices are found not used in local cuisine although they and their holistic qualities are well known. We do so we travel there.

Some leathery earwigs crawled in.