Relight

In Relight nothing is labelled. The traveller is shown a slab lying in a shallow well, a rail carrying a single bead, and a knurled cylinder, and he is told these are the instruments of government.

He presses the slab. It sinks, then returns with the reluctance of something heavy, and he notes that the returning takes longer than the sinking. He slides the bead, and the rail beneath it begins to give off light of its own, so that the condition of the thing is written nowhere and is simply visible, the way a lit window tells you somebody is home.

Then he turns the cylinder. The room changes temperature. Not the air. The light. Every surface he has already catalogued is now a different colour, and he understands he was never adjusting a number. He was adjusting the afternoon.