Chapter 5
Episode 5miningB one more try 77
The sewing machine hummed under my fingers, a low, steady vibration that felt like the heartbeat of the apartment. Outside the window, the Earth hung in its perpetual crescent, a blue-and-white marble against the black. I had been here for hours, maybe days—time had a way of dissolving into the rhythm of the needle. The dress was no longer a dress. It was a grid of black lines, red and yellow squares, a Mondrian dream stitched into fabric. But something was missing. The 7% di al. That elusive percentage. I had calculated it on scraps of paper, on the condensation-fogged glass, on the back of my hand with a pen that bled ink into my skin. Seven percent of what? Of the fabric? Of the thread? Of the space between the stitches? The numbers danced, refusing to settle.
I pressed my foot on the pedal, and the machine stitched a straight line, black thread on white cotton. It was a line of certainty, a border I could trust. But trust. The word felt foreign, like a language I had once known but forgotten. Am į real? The question echoed in the hollow of my chest. I looked at my hands—pale, thin, moving with a life of their own. They were my hands, but they felt like avatars, puppets in a game I hadn't agreed to play. Platino game. The phrase surfaced from somewhere deep, a memory of a game I had never played, a level I had never reached. Mining B. The B stood for something. Būt. To be. But to be what?
The needle jammed. I stopped, pulled the fabric free, and found a tangle of thread beneath the plate. A knot. A snarl. I tried to untangle it, but my fingers were clumsy, shaking. The Russian grammar I had never learned pressed against my thoughts, a wall of words I couldn't climb. Why iš that like first art to be the Russia language? The question was a splinter, lodged deep. I had no answer. Only the loneliness, the cold, the endless mining of memory for something solid.
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