Field guide No. 274
The onion’s impossible reflection
It's been listening to you chop.
A halved red onion sits on brushed steel, and its reflection shows its rings curled into the shape of an ear. Mind what you say in the kitchen.
Field noteSteel reflects what’s set on it. Here the onion is one shape and its reflection another, both at once.
- Specimen
- No. 274
- Genus
- Generated
- Kind
- Impossible (the round square kind)
- Breaks
- Category
- Where it doesn’t exist
- Brushed steel, in a kitchen that listens.
- Nearest existing relative
- A red onion.
- Filed in Fresh slop as
- Objects
Also impossible, also breaking category
The missing beamA beam of light is light. Solid enough to lift a chunk out and leave it on a seat, it’s also not.
An honest reflectionA mirror showing somewhere else is a mirror and a window at once. Mud on the sink takes the window’s side.
The unfinished visitorFur at the head, marble at the tail, sitting up. Carved and alive at once, the rabbit is both.
Wheelbarrow's unexpected sailboat reflectionA reflection that shows something else is not, by definition, its reflection. And yet it is.