Her mother rips open Rabbit’s body and throws the stuffed carcass at her daughter. Sam flinches as the remains hit her in the face.
“Why do you think I work all day?” her mother asks. “For fun?”
Sam’s voice trembles. “No, Mama.”
“Your head is always in the clouds. You have no fear at all. You’re sostupid.”
Sam is too scared to lift her eyes, so instead she stares down through the blur of her tears at Rabbit’s remains. She thinks about all the times she’d told it stories, how carefully it always listened to her, how it’d comforted her for so many years. Then she thinks about the idiocy of her grief. Rabbit isn’t alive. It is a toy mass-manufactured in a factory somewhere by machine hands, pumped out of a steel chute and wrapped in plastic and shipped to a store. It has no real ears to listen to her. It has no real eyes to see her. It is an object composed of other objects and it doesn’t give a shit how Sam feels. The crack on the ceiling is just a crack on the ceiling, and the snail’s shell is just a snail’s shell, and the dandelions growing in the pavement are just a bunch of weeds.
Rabbit is nothing but a stuffed animal, its innards spilling across her lap in a cloud of cotton.
The sudden silence seems to deflate her mother. She places the knife down on the counter, her shoulders sagging, and stares at the trembling figure of her little girl. But she doesn’t apologize.
“I’m only going to tell you this one time.” She leans down to give Sam a hard stare. “I don’t ever want to see you looking upalchemyagain.”
Sam is shaking too hard to speak, so she just nods. She can’t tell if her progress report or her searches have upset her mother more. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? She understands the anger over her grades. But why at alchemy?
Her mother turns her back and goes to the kitchen sink, where she starts washing the dishes. The shame in Sam’s chest feels like a crater, gaping and bloody. All she wants right now is for her mother not to be angry with her, so she makes herself a silent promise to never look up alchemy again.
But that does not stop the questions from burrowing themselves deeper into her mind. Even now, she feels an overwhelming sense that there is an entire world out there with its walls up, the knowledge beyond her reach. And if she had been just curious before, her mother’s reaction is the wind that ignites the spark, the not-knowing festering in her with the hunger of a fire.
What is everyone so afraid of? What is beyond her? Why can’t she know?
Alongside Isaac Newton’s more famous works, such asPrincipia MathematicaandOpticks,are a million words of alchemical notes, some of which have survived in manuscripts. One such manuscript sold at auction in 2018 to Friends of the Angel City Central Library, and while the physical copy remains in the private collection here at the Alexander Reed Gallery, we have uploaded some of its contents for public use. To inquire about viewing the physical copy, a reservation request can be made online up to two weeks in advance.
Angel City Central Library,
Alexander Reed Gallery main site
