The gates of the hospital dangle open from black iron poles. Graves litter the hospital grounds. Abandon hope, preaches the graffiti on the wall, all ye who enter h---.
There it turns into a long and bloody scrawl.
"I am not sure," complains the girl, "that this is the best facility to treat a wounded hand."
The Minister bends over. He reads the text on one of the gravestones. His face wrinkles in a sneer, as if to say is that all you have accomplished? to the immutable stone.
He says, "You can see the sign of the red cross above it, which means Hospital."
"It could be a red plus," argues the girl.
The minister straightens. "Meaning?"
"Arithmetic kills."
"Trigonometry kills," says the minister. "Geometry, perhaps. Not arithmetic."
The girl's name is Ink Catherly, but everybody calls her the imago. It's an algebraic operation you can perform on Hilbert spaces, she'll tell you, and maybe that's the truth.
Posted by rebecca at October 8, 2006 03:51 PM