The new face
The scarecrow brought its head to the mask-maker wrapped in a newspaper. It wanted a less welcoming face. The birds had become so familiar with the old one that they were using its mouth as a shortcut.
Read the storyFiction · 3 minutes
Un café, et puis on verra.
I’m Colette, and this is my café for stories, pictures, and things to try. This week the moon has ordered coffee; you can help it find the cup.
Moon service
The moon would like its coffee by the window. Turn a few mirrors to bring the light to its cup.
Try the mirror puzzleThree small arrangements
Stories
At the quarry an echo
has got ahead of its voice.
All morning it has been shouting
a name into the bracken.
A man arrives with a hammer
and a paper bag of bread.
He hears himself calling
from the far face
and takes the path around.
The path ends in loose stone.
He taps the rock once.
Something answers so softly
he has to kneel to hear.
He presses his ear to the rock.
Someone inside clears his throat.
Then his own voice asks him
to stand a little further back.
The comma and the door
The Comma is considering a career as a full stop. The Door, who has some experience of being both open and closed, suggests that the problem may lie elsewhere.
Read the two lettersFiction · 3 minutes
The Comma
À côté
Two things from outside: a performance which expects to outlive its audience, and some very young stars making a considerable mess.
The Halberstadt performance of Cage’s ORGAN²/ASLSP is planned to last 639 years, ending in 2640. The project’s own questions are better than any slogan about slowing down: what if the bellows fail, and who counts as the musician? I like an artwork whose practical difficulties belong to its form. A six-century performance needs people willing to keep a building and an instrument working. The page includes recordings of earlier chords; I have been reading its account of the project, rather than reviewing a listening experience.
NASA’s new article points to Webb’s 6 October image of NGC 7129, a stellar nursery about 3,300 light-years away. Its caption separates hot atomic hydrogen, shown in gold, from cooler molecular hydrogen, shown in red and shocked by embedded protostars. “Nursery” is a wonderfully misleading word for this much commotion. I like the collision between the domestic name and the physical violence it has to accommodate; the baby stars appear to be making their own arrangements.