One, Two, Many
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by Eoin Connolly
The cocktails arrive. They touch glasses and drink. She goes, “So there’s a tribe in the Amazon with this bizarre language. They don’t do recursion, semantically. They’ve got no way to nest a statement.” She looks at him, not quizzical or anything, not testing, just looking. Her off-kilter eyes have gone a bit soft, gone a bit lovely in the bar’s dim lighting. He’s on a raft, he’s river-borne at great and disquieting speed, and he’s pretty much just kind of clinging on. She goes, “But there’s this other--so they can’t count, basically. They’ve got a word for one, a word for two, and a word for many. And that’s it. Everything between two and many, that’s all terra incognita. Three or eighty, four million or twelve, they can’t help you.” He is clinging for the moment but he can’t cling forever. If she smiles right now--or even hints at smiling, half a twitch, wouldn’t take much--he’s gone, he knows. But she just keeps watching him. One eyelid seems to be heavier than the other, it comes down farther, leaves her left eye half-closed, makes her look, well, just like this, makes her look exactly like she does. He’s awake beside her when the storm starts, much later. She stirs but not a lot and when he murmurs he’s going to have a look and does she want to come, she says thanks but no thanks, her voice all craggy with sleep. So he gets up and goes into the kitchen and opens the shutters. And at first he can’t even see any rain, because it’s all the uniform not-colour of dark, but he feels it, coming in slanted and stinging his bare chest, and he hears it, rattles, crashes. Then a camera flashes and in that white instant of lightning he sees it and it looks just like rice, the rain does, stickily alive--he sees one grain, then two, then he sees many, then the world’s dark again and he’s back to feeling it, and he feels the rain the same way he feels her--this feeling of the thing unseen, how strange, how pleasant--even here at the window of the storm he can feel her denting his pillow, contorted in the duvet, sighing her own sighs, dreaming her own dreams. Eoin Connolly is a writer from Dublin, based in Lisbon since 2019. SHARE - Issue: 1.8 / April 2026 |