Slipping between moments, dodging spaces; they come to gather the tears that are shed – forever flowing, somewhere – and save them from the void, to remember them. They catch the tears in tubes and bottles, seal them, catalogue them; labelled and shelved forever in their archives. For every tear there is a story, and it is the stories on which they feed, reading the tales of sadness and joy, reading of lives far truer than their own, and it sustains them. They breeze through our world like a draft, visible only in their passage; a rustle of leaves, a flutter of pages; and then are gone, back to their own place.
They can be tricked – tired of stories about onions, they appear nonetheless – the tears are irresistible. We have a story about a man named Egg, who caught one in a bucket of paint. It fawned and cowered pathetically until Egg was overcome with remorse; he let it go out of guilt. It had fled, returning only to leave a gift for his mercy – a memory, tiny and hardly significant; but one he had missed.
The memory – he never told anybody what it was of – inspired Egg, and he began to paint; beautiful flowing visions of another world flourished from his brushes. Soon, Egg’s pictures were earning enough for him to build a magnificent house, to buy all the things he had ever wanted; but Egg still cried, sometimes, still managed to shed his tears – because he never forgot where it had all come from.