In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Link.
Of course, the tale provoked mystery and wonder in Maricela, who watched the moon. It seemed so nearby.
Cruz–he’d been anxiously wondering what might come next–said, “But what’s troubling now is the distance between words in typical text.”
“Cruz,” Maricela said, “can one man invent a new tradition?”
“It has nothing to do with that. Consider the distance between three typical words in a sentence. The distance between those words is a little more than the width of a letter in whatever typeface is being applied plus the almost imperceptible distance between two letters, approximately. As far as I know there is no name for the distance between words. In any event, we must work on putting more distance between words.”
“Yet studies say that adding significantly to the distance between words will add that much more distance between you and your father,” Maricela said.
“That may be true,” Cruz said. “And logical. I rarely call him. If we place more distance between the words love and father, therefore, I will be less likely to call my father on his birthday.”
“Which you forgot last year,” Maricela reminded him.
“It’s because he was born in a difficult season of months.”
After a moment, Maricela said, “Which is, of course, significant, as we can graph our own relationships with points on a grid at arbitrary distances.”
The moon. It had appeared from behind the nearer trees. From the direction of the river, they heard the drone of frogs, which reminded Cruz of sand, Maricela of ice crystals suspended in blue light.
“Aristotle’s eye brows brought to mind a memory I had as a child,” Cruz said. At the same time that he uttered these words, Maricela’s ornithological hand moved from the top of her head, passed across the face of the moon, and came to rest on her knee. “I had been young. A ball had rolled under a car. I got on my stomach in preparations for reaching under to retrieve the ball, which had come to rest against the exhaust. In that position, I saw a horse. I saw the lofted edges of the distant downtown buildings utterly grayed out. I saw the upper crusts of the mountains. I saw shadows that amounted to the violence of war. Then someone kicked me in the ankles and told me to hurry and get the ball. And that was when I saw the ball.”
“The eye brows are very complicated,” Maricela said. At the same time she said this, she saw two things, if it can be said that as we speak we can also see things in the mind’s eye. The first thing she saw was Cruz’s herpetological hand move from a knee to the back of his head where the fingers began to scratch, the sound of which brought to her the imagined sound of Aristotle rearranging his eye brows with a small black comb. The second item was the image of Cruz’s father, who was standing beneath an impression of Maricela when she was young and had climbed the roof of her house to watch the moon light refract in the clouds. In her logical mind she knew that it had not been Cruz’s father but her own father standing in the yard and calling up to her that she must come down from there as she might fall. But in this iteration of the impression, Cruz’s father had replaced her father and was not calling up to Maricela but to Cruz, a young Cruz who was seated at the top of Maricela’s house, observing the sky, and how the clouds and the moon light–their subtle physical synthesis, their strange roundness, glow, and flock-like structure–brought to Cruz’s mind the sound of the ocean.
