The Spoon That Wasn't Sorry

The spoon came wrapped in newspaper with no card, which was very much like Soren's aunt.

"It's a spoon," Maya said.

"It's a heavy spoon," Soren said. He set it on the table. It rang like a coin.

"Aluminum's light. That's not aluminum." She picked it up and turned it toward the window. "Too shiny. Too blue. Where's the note?"

"There isn't one. She thinks jokes are better without instructions."

"Okay." Maya closed her hand around the bowl of the spoon. "So it's a joke. What's the joke."

Soren opened his notebook and drew the spoon. He wrote silvery, blue-ish, cold, heavy. His pencil stopped over cold. He put his own hand around the handle to check.

"It's not that cold anymore," he said.

"Because you're holding it."

"No, everything gets warm if you hold it. This is different." He held it up. The handle had gone dull where his fingers had been, like breath on a mirror. "It's sweating."

Maya took it back. She was quiet, and then she said, "Soren. Look at the edge."

The thin lip of the bowl, where the metal was narrowest, had gone soft. Not bent. Rounded. As though someone had left it near a candle. There was no candle. There was only the gray rainy light and their two hands.

"We did that," Maya said. "Our hands did that."

"Hands aren't hot enough to melt metal."

"Hands aren't hot enough to melt most metal." She was already smiling the smile she got when the world had a trapdoor in it. "What if this one melts low. Like, really low. Like us low."

Soren pressed his thumb flat against the bowl and held it. He counted to twenty. When he lifted his thumb, there was a dent in the shape of his thumb, shining and wet, and a bead of something ran down toward his wrist and hung there like mercury that had learned to be silver.

"That's a liquid," he said. "That was solid metal and now it's a liquid and I did it with my thumb."

"You did it with ninety-eight point six degrees," Maya said. "That's all you've got. That's all a body is."

They put the spoon in the freezer to watch it come back. Four minutes later it was hard again, and cold, and perfect, and the thumbprint was gone as if it had never been dented at all. Maya melted the tip a second time just to freeze it a third. Soren did it six times, because six was how many it took before he believed a spoon could keep being a spoon after being a puddle.

"It doesn't remember," he said. "Every time it goes solid it forgets it was ever ruined."

"It wasn't ruined. It was just warm." Maya set it down. "What's the melting number, though. Exactly. Room's warm today and it didn't puddle on the table, only where we touched it."

Soren did the arithmetic in his head. "Warmer than the room. Colder than us. So somewhere in between. Like, just barely above a hot day."

"Which means," Maya said slowly, "tea."

They both looked at the kettle.

Soren wrote a line in the notebook, his hand moving fast now, and set the pencil down without finishing the word. Maya was already filling the kettle. Neither of them said the plan out loud because the plan was too good to risk saying wrong.

The kettle climbed to a rattle. Maya poured a mug, steam standing straight up off it. Soren held the spoon over the rim.

"If we're right," he said.

"We're right."

"If we're right, this is going to be the strangest thing I've ever done to a drink."

He lowered the spoon into the tea.

For one second it was just a spoon in a mug, ordinary, boring, a photograph of a spoon. Then the handle above the water began to lean. The bowl went first, softening, sagging, and then the whole shape let go of being a shape. It slid off the handle in a smooth silver rope and sank, and where it sank the bottom of the mug went bright and mirror-colored, a little pool of liquid metal sitting under the tea, wobbling, catching the ceiling light and throwing it back up at them.

Maya didn't breathe.

The rest of the handle slumped and slipped in after it. In under a minute there was no spoon. There was tea, and beneath the tea a shivering coin of something that had been a solid object one minute ago and was now lying at the bottom like a small captured moon.

"It dissolved," Soren whispered. "No. Not dissolved. It melted. The tea was hotter than the metal could stay hard."

"We drink tea that hot," Maya said. "We put that in our mouths. It's cooler than a spoon that isn't even a spoon anymore. Soren. The number's right in the middle of us. Room can't melt it. Tea can. We can."

"There's a metal," Soren said, "that thinks a human hand is an oven."

They stood over the mug. The little silver pool at the bottom trembled every time a truck went by outside, sending slow rings up through the tea.

Maya reached out and wrapped both hands around the hot mug, not to pour it, not to drink it, just to hold the warmth that had unmade a spoon.

"Everything solid," she said, "is only solid because nothing's warm enough yet."

Soren looked at his own thumb, at the ordinary skin that ran at ninety-eight point six degrees, the same as yesterday, the same as always, and now apparently hot enough to turn a metal into a river.

Outside, the rain kept coming. Inside, the silver coin at the bottom of the mug held perfectly still, waiting for the tea to cool, ready to become hard again and forget the whole thing.