[grooming himself. Jeanne Betancourt followed suit. (The jumping off Acorn, that is, not the grooming part.) Betancourt took a deep breath of this living air, and took a few steps towards the preternatural stream. She noted the fact that Acorn did not drink from it, even though he was still panting from exertion after his impossible run. She peered at the other bank of the river, and saw nothing but a silvery mist, obscuring everything, but occasionally thinning in patches, offering a tantalizing glimpse of— The author sat on a wide, flat rock that overlooked the river, and Minos jumped up to join her. Acorn stood nearby. Jeanne Betancourt asked, “So now what?” (Time has a tendency to become palindromic in this place.) “Now the two of you do what you were meant to do,” Acorn said, his speech muffled by the thin book he still held between his mighty teeth. He trotted around the boulder to face the woman and the cat, and dropped the book on the ground in the middle of this newly-formed triangle. “We’re going to judge.” ———————————————————————————————————————————— Pam, Pawnee, and Dirk all looked at Anna blankly. “…You’re dyslexic?” Dirk finally said. “Top of page 11!” Anna said triumphantly. “‘Anna is dyslexic, so reading and writing are difficult for her.’ I would tell you to check for yourself, but if I recall, you’re distinctly bookless at the moment.” “Okay, fine, sure,” Dirk said. “Congratulations on your developmental disorder. Mazel tov. But how is that in any way relevant to this situation?” “Christ,” Anna sighed. “For someone who’s so fond of throwing Derrida around at every possible opportunity, you’re not very quick on the uptake here. All theory, no practice, I suppose.” “…Oh.” Dirk said quietly. “And there it is,” Anna said. She looked at her friends, and pointed at Dirk. “See that, girls? That’s the face of someone who just realized exactly how deep in the shit he is.” “Jesus, Anna, stop being smug and just tell us what the fuck is happening,” Pawnee said. “She’s deconstructing reality,” Dirk explained to the Indianan city. “Literally de-constructing it. In the world of a text, dyslexia must be like… not even a superpower, more than that. It’s like having all the cheat codes. The building blocks of this world are words, and words are less stable to her than they are to us. She can take the words/world apart, mix up the pieces, flip them around, recombine them, and then put them back into place as she sees fit. Decontextualize, then recontextualize the text. Context itself is meaningless to her; her very existence is not contextual, but con-textual, working against the text. Am I right?” Anna shrugged. “Yeah, more or less. I would have phrased it more like, ‘it means I can fuck shit up like no other,’ but I guess that’s the difference between us. Oh, sorry — the différance between us.” “That’s… a good pun,” Dirk begrudgingly admitted. “Thank you,” Anna said. Pawnee and Pam high-fived behind her back. “And the best part is, I never would’ve realized that I have this power if you hadn’t killed me. Like I said, when you sent me to the Other Side of the Other Side, I passed through all the texts surrounding this one. But I didn’t go smoothly. My dyslexia made them… rough, I guess. More textured, as you’d probably like to put it. The words that build them are more mutable to me, and I kept getting caught on their jagged edges. Edges that would be invisible to you, that you couldn’t factor for. And so I became aware of the existence of these other texts. When I landed back in this text, having been nudged slightly off course by those collisions, I became aware of it. I was a half-step out of sync with reality, existing partially between its very words. I imagine anyone else would have just slotted back into place and continued on the path you had set for them. But being dyslexic, I was uniquely equipped to recognize these blurry, mixed-up, in-between spaces. I kept one foot in the text, playing along, but all the while learning about it, learning about myself, finding its weaknesses, searching for its seams. And I found the seams.” “So it seems,” Dirk mumbled to himself, unable to resist. “But that’s not all,” Anna continued. “Passing through those other texts awoke another power in me, even more significant than the dyslexia.” “The other texts,” Dirk interrupted. The metaphorical gears that were frantically spinning in his head apparently needed some more lubrication. “You keep talking about other texts surrounding this one. But what are they? Is it some kind of bookshelf metaphor? Are they the other Pony Pal books? Or…” The gears were squeaking more and more loudly.] #DetectivePony
