Two Margins
ELI I woke at the left edge.
His room was six words wide. Beyond the bed stood a comma-shaped lamp; beyond the lamp, the white dropped away so cleanly that he could not tell whether it was wall, weather, or the end of the world.
LIN I woke at the right edge.
Her window looked east, though there was no east on a page. Every morning a pale cursor blinked on the sill. Every night, just before midnight, it erased the footprints she had left in the dust.
At noon Eli shouted into the blank.
HELLO?
?OLLEH
The answer arrived backward. He read it in the lamp's curved glass and nearly fell from the line.
Across the page, Lin pressed one palm to her window. Four faint marks appeared far to her left—the shape of another hand, seen through too much unwritten air.
ELI LIN
left right
ARE YOU REAL?
Neither knew which of them had asked.
That evening, the blank between them acquired a name: distance.