Jules Sketchbook

"Nûveshá lé zi ja zhúl zhôm."

On Rubos, we have a word: nûveshá.

nû — an echo / something faint / faded memory

vesh — ache / pull / the gravity of a feeling

-á — internal / emotional state clarifier

Stacks of cardboard boxes kept vigil just inside the bedroom door, the words “BEDROOM” and “CLOTHES” scrawled with black marker across them in perfectly blocky letters. Some were open, their flaps revealing newspaper-wrapped trinkets and knick-knacks or half-vomiting unworn clothes onto the cold hardwood floors. The dark bedroom was barren, the old wardrobe half opened with mostly empty hangers dangling on the rack: a black trench coat and a neatly pressed uniform blouse with a digitized camo pattern hung together in the solemn closet, the lone watchers keeping an eye on the brooding bedroom.

The king-sized bed in the center of the room idled with its blankets half-dragged to the floor, the nightstand beside it empty of everything but a phone with a cracked screen and a single framed photo of two smiling teenagers. The bamboo slat blinds were pulled tight, barring the dawn’s golden light from breaching the space. Instead, only a soft glow diffused into the room from their edges, casting the faintest light into the cold apartment.

Rotary fingers chugged across keys, the caps eroded into blank plateaus by the touch of the lonely crypt keeper. Digits unwound into a snarl of loose threads, unspooled, undisciplined. He considered them for moments longer, watching the ebb and flow of each value, assigning it a priority in an endless stream of tasks.

Click.

He twisted an artificial connection about his forefinger and fished for it. The lure, the bait. A great spider perched in the throat of an orderly web, threads in a million spun directions, waiting. Patiently. Click. He pulled another plug from the monolithic switchboard and plunged it into his shell. Fingers fluttered faster. This tomb of data drifted far on the fringes of the known, its screens haunted by restless analog ghosts. He felt their presence over his shoulders, in the sleeping servers, in the reels of spooled data shoved haphazardly into every nook and cranny.

Click.