Rodney's aberrant decease places him in that peculiar limbo in which all creatures find themselves when stuck between life and death. In this indeterminate condition, life is but a glint in a misty glass eye, a protracted gesture about to be completed, a mute scream caught between throat and vocal cords without sufficient air to become audible.

In this fluctuating boundary between paralysis and action, silence and eloquence, light and shade, reigns the impenetrable fate of half-finished lives. Such is the fatal destiny of a sudden winter's unsuspecting victims, doomed to a hibernation where their velvet petals, translucent wings and furry skins crystallize into silver icicles.

Caught in the eternal sleep of unfinished fairy stories, he can only go further inside his misery or out into the volatile atmosphere of human empathy - a precarious port to which he fastens himself, seeking in this temporary crossroads consolation for his bereavement.

Everything seeps into his translucent bubble but none of it ever crosses the invisible wall that separates him from life - fleeting images that occupy the reflective material without even minimally disturbing it, false promises of an affiliation whose disparate elements bounce off each other like the slippery fragments of a mercury droplet.

Rodney is alive somewhere in the shallow depths of his incarceration. Ours is the quiet communion that occurs between beings whose bond is so strong it needs no outward manifestation, only the occasional glee at having found a kindred soul. It is not I who impose this bond on an inert being, but rather he wh0, reaching out from the bottom of his sadness, touched my heart that afternoon in the Chateau Tivoli, calling my then-distracted attention to the place where our existences converge.

Celeste Olalquiaga,
The Artificial Kingdom

FIN