How It Happened
Yavni Bar-Yam
They laughed so hard that night that their faces fell off. It was the sort of night that everything outside blurs to dull inconsequence, and the blurriness reaches even inside the bubble of warmth and tipsy jollity, so that time feels like a material thing in your hands, and the matterful stuff of the world rushes past you like time. A night that one or the other of them, or some ambiguous combination of the two, would probably eventually brave a kiss.
When they put their faces back on, Kem and Sol got them confused, and each found himself looking at his own face on the other. Seeing now how beautiful he himself was in Kem’s eyes, Sol’s chest cavity inflated, and any doubt about Kem accepting a kiss disintegrated and was gone. The same must have been true for Kem. But there would be no kiss, because then each of them would be kissing his own lips, which just did not have the same appeal. Oh well; sometimes you skirt a thornbush and fall into a ditch.
It was too happy a night to mourn the lost chance, and the laughter kept tumbling around them like a flood.
Just as Sol was starting to feel like he might, some day, get used to this new face on his own self, he found it jostling around as he laughed again, with a different group of friends, and then a guffaw sent it flying off. He ran with Kem’s old face in his hands all the way to Kem’s house, hoping to get his own face back. But a stranger answered the door, who turned out to be no stranger, just Kem with a new face. “Oh no!” said Kem, “I didn’t know that you— I’m so sorry.” At that moment, Sol’s face was on its way across the sea on some other person, on some ship. Oh well; sometimes things you misplaced you never recover.
The night Kem and Sol had first lost their faces had been the sort of night that has a foreign, one-time-only exchange rate for laughter. You wouldn’t expect the nonsense Kem and Sol spouted that night to be funny to anyone else, only perplexing, though it might cause a smile in memory to one of them or more laughter to both of them together. So you would have thought, but in fact, they had chanced upon a new comedy alloy 20% stronger and 30% more joyful than the previous best. And in spite of its intimate origins, the new humor was bound to spread, be translated, mutate, and develop, with or without Kem and Sol’s awareness. With the new discovery, joy in the world grew more common and more sweet, and laughter grew more frequent and more vigorous.
Sol did see his face again; somehow it made its way back across the sea, and he happened upon it on the street. He introduced himself to the woman behind it (it was becoming an accepted trend to introduce yourself whenever you saw someone you knew or didn’t know or weren’t sure if you knew), and said “That was my face!” They chatted and were friendly and smiled, but their responses to each other fit together loosely like a parent’s pair of shoes on a child’s feet, so they built nothing, laughed not enough to so much as loosen a jaw, and made no plans to talk again. And that was that.
Many years passed before Sol saw his face again, this time on someone somewhere between child and adult. Sol introduced himself and said “That’s my face!”
The young person laughed as if laughter were as common to them as speaking and said, “What do you mean your face?”
Sometimes, while mumbling ancient Jewish texts to himself, Yavni Bar-Yam accidentally conjures creatures or people. He then tries to find them homes. Sometimes a metaphor outgrows the raised bed in Yavni’s bellybutton and becomes a weed. He then tries to pick its fruit.
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