The Spoon That Wouldn't Stay

The tag on the box said EVERYTHING ONE DOLLAR, and the box smelled like basement.

"Look at this," Maya said. She held up a spoon. It was heavy and mirror-bright, brighter than the other silverware, brighter than anything on the folding table.

"That's not silver," Soren said. "Silver goes dull. That looks like it was polished this morning."

"Nobody polished anything in here." Maya turned it in the sunlight. "There's a name scratched on the handle. B. Corliss."

The woman running the sale was arguing with someone about a lawnmower and did not look over.

Maya closed her hand around the bowl of the spoon to feel how heavy it was. She kept talking. Soren was reading the bottom of a cardboard box, so it was a while before either of them looked back at her fist.

"Soren."

"What."

"My hand is wet."

He looked. Something silver was running between her fingers. Not dripping like water. Sliding, slow and thick, like a bead of mercury from a broken thermometer, except it clung and shivered and caught the light.

Maya opened her hand fast.

Half the spoon was gone. The bowl had slumped into a shining puddle in her palm, and the puddle was moving, finding the low places between her fingers.

"Don't drop it," Soren said.

"I'm not going to drop it, it's dropping itself." She tilted her hand and the little pool ran to the edge and hung there, trembling, refusing to fall.

"Is it hot? Does it burn?"

"No. That's the weird part. It's not even warm. It's just melting."

Soren grabbed the handle end, the part still solid. It was cool and firm, an ordinary metal spoon that happened to have lost its head.

"Set it down," he said. "Set the melted part down. On the table."

Maya tipped her palm over a chipped saucer. The silver ran off her skin in one bright thread and pooled in the dish. They both leaned in, close enough to see their own eyes reflected.

And it stopped.

Not slowly. The moving edge of the puddle went still, then hardened, the shine turning from wet to solid the way the top of pudding turns to skin, except all the way through. In a few seconds it was a lump. A cold, gleaming metal lump sitting in a saucer.

Maya poked it. "It's a rock now."

"Pick it up again."

She did. She held it tight, and they both watched, and this time they were watching for it. The corners went first. The lump lost its edges. Then it sagged, soft, and then it was liquid again, filling the lines of her palm.

"Okay," Soren said, and his voice had gone very careful. "It melts in your hand. Just your hand. And then the saucer freezes it."

"The saucer's not cold. I felt it."

"No." He put two fingers on the saucer, then on Maya's wrist. "You're warmer. Your hand's warmer than the table."

Maya went quiet, holding the little pool. "How much warmer? It can't be much."

"It doesn't have to be much." He was thinking out loud now, fast. "Ice melts a couple degrees over freezing. This melts a couple degrees over room temperature. Except room temperature today, in this garage, is right at the line. So the table's just below and your hand's just above."

"So I'm the summer," Maya said, "and the table's the winter, and this stuff can't tell the difference between the two except by two degrees."

"Body heat. Your hand is thirty-seven. The metal melts way under that." He looked at the puddle sliding in her palm. "You're not doing anything. You're just being alive next to it. That's enough to turn a spoon into a liquid."

Maya held very still. The silver quivered with her pulse, a tiny tide going in and out at the base of her thumb.

"There's a metal," she said slowly, "whose whole personality is right at the edge of a person."

"B. Corliss," Soren said. He was staring at the scratched handle. "Somebody made a spoon out of it. On purpose. As a joke. Imagine handing that to a guest."

"You stir your tea and your spoon disappears." Maya laughed, but it came out shaky. "The tea's hot. It'd melt even faster in tea."

"That's the joke. It's a spoon that won't survive being a spoon."

They looked at each other over the shining palmful.

"There's a whole shelf of things like this," Maya said. "Has to be. Stuff that's solid or liquid or gas depending on whether you're standing next to it. We only think everything's solid because we happen to be thirty-seven degrees. If we ran hotter, half the world would be soup."

"If we ran colder, the air would rain," Soren said. "The line's just wherever we happen to sit." He pulled his notebook out of his back pocket and wrote, standing up, the saucer balanced on the box beside him. B. Corliss. A spoon that melts at the temperature of a hand. Where is the line for everything else.

Maya poured the metal back into the saucer. It ran, hung, dropped, and set into a lump again, still, cold, done.

"How much do you want for this?" she called out.

The woman looked over, distracted, sweaty. "The saucer? Quarter."

"The thing in the saucer."

"Honey, that's a piece of scrap. Take it. Take the spoon handle too."

Maya lifted the lump out of the saucer and it started to change the second it touched her skin, softening, going bright and slow and alive again. She cupped both hands so it wouldn't run out between her fingers, and she carried it out of the garage into the full heat of the sidewalk, where the sun was hotter than any hand.

The puddle in her hands began to shiver harder, spreading flatter, reaching for the edges .