coin, i)
I found a coin in my pocket today.
Finding any coin in my pocket is a rare enough event in my life, as my pockets are usually full of nothing more than week-old receipts and chewing gum wrappers. Finding this particular coin, however, was a miracle.
Small, circular, silver - It felt like nothing more than a quarter in my hand. Having extracted it from my pocket and scraped the lint off its surface, though, the coin turned out to be something far more bizarre.
"RÊPUBLIKKA LUGGNAGG," it read, the bold text wrapping around the coin's edge. In the centre was etched a stylized map of some unfamiliar island, framed by martlets - presumably Luggnagg's coat of arms. I could just barely make out the nation's motto, written just above the map: Semper reliquum est. "There is always a remainder."
I flipped the coin over. An old man's face stared back at me - wrinkled sheets hanging off a cheekbone frame. His name, written above his portrait, was an unpronounceable sequence of consonant clusters and accented vowels. There were two dates on the coin: 1726 and 1990. The prior was written just below the man's name, set off to the left, followed by a hyphen and a blank space. The latter date was below.
The man looked too old to be alive, but the coin suggested that he was - or, at least, he was alive when the coin was issued in 1990, if that's what the date meant. That would make him 264 years old. Nonsense.
Perhaps the date referred to something else, like the founding of the nation. Perhaps the dash, pointing into the future towards some undetermined end, was the national mint's way of rejecting the myth of the state's immortality. Â It seemed impossible: The country's currency would not predict its own end. Very unlikely, indeed.
IÂ slipped the coin back into my pocket - and into the back of my thoughts. Google would clear this all up later.
I continued along.
