Alastair saw the world in shimmering overlays. To him, every interaction, every unspoken trend, every fleeting cultural obsession was a tangible thing: a color, a texture, a scent. He was an ephemera collector, and the city was his hunting ground.
His workshop was a library of captured moments. On one shelf, a sealed flask held the murky, comfortable green of ‘Goblin Mode’, smelling faintly of old blankets and salted crisps. Beside it, a bell jar contained the shimmering, iridescent vapor of a city-wide ‘Vibe Shift’ from last autumn. He even had a small, corked vial holding the essence of ‘Girl Dinner’—a pale, elegant mist that tasted of cheese, crackers, and defiant self-sufficiency.
Today, he was hunting for something potent, a term that had blazed into existence with the heat of a new sun: ‘rizz’. He’d seen flickers of it, weak sparks from awkward teenagers and over-rehearsed pick-up artists. But he was after the pure stuff—the effortless, supernova-grade article.
He found it in a crowded marketplace, emanating from a young man selling artisanal honey. The man wasn’t conventionally handsome, but he moved with a liquid grace. The ephemera around him was a corona of liquid gold, a low, magnetic hum that drew people in not with force, but with an irresistible gravity. He wasn’t just talking about honey; he was weaving spells. A woman who approached looking harried left with a smile and three jars, seemingly forgetting what had troubled her. Alastair watched, his breath held, the intricate glass mechanism of his athame—his collection tool—gleaming in his coat sleeve.
This was the specimen. Pure, uncut main character energy, focused into a ray of pure charm. Capturing it would be the crown jewel of his 2020s collection.
He prepared the athame, its crystal tip designed to siphon the very concept from the air around a person, leaving them… well. Leaving them without. Alastair tried not to think about the aftermath. He’d seen it once before—a woman from whom he’d harvested a particularly powerful strain of ‘It’s Giving…’—and she had become abruptly, terrifyingly blank. An NPC in her own life story. The cost of preservation was steep.
As he moved closer, a young woman with paint-stained fingers and skeptical eyes approached the honey stand. The golden aura of the vendor intensified, swirling around her. “Let him cook,” Alastair whispered to himself, a collector’s admiration for the art. The man launched into a story about a specific queen bee, his voice a perfect cadence.
But the woman wasn’t buying it. She tilted her head, a small smile playing on her lips. “That’s a nice story,” she said, her voice clear above the market din. “But what’s the terroir of the actual clover field?”
The golden aura flickered. The young man blinked, his smooth narrative momentarily shattered. The perfect, performative charm was met with a demand for the authentic. He stammered for a second, then a genuine, sheepish grin broke across his face. “Honestly? It’s just a big field next to the highway. But the bees don’t seem to mind.”
The woman laughed, a real, unvarnished sound. And in that moment, the ephemera changed. The brilliant, monolithic gold of ‘rizz’ fractured, dissolving into a thousand smaller, more complex colors. Alastair saw the soft rose of nascent affection, the pale blue of shared vulnerability, the flickering silver of a joke landing just right. What had been a collectible monolith was now a messy, uncontainable ‘situationship’ in its first five seconds of life. It was beautiful. It was real. And it was utterly impossible to capture.
Alastair lowered his athame.
He walked away from the market, leaving the jar meant for ‘Rizz’ empty in his pocket. He passed a cafe where a group of men were talking loudly. He caught a distinct, sepia-toned frequency, a low thrumming drone. One of them was thinking about the Roman Empire again. Alastair smiled, but didn’t even reach for his tools.
Back in his workshop, he looked at his rows of bottled phenomena. He saw the swirling, rainbow-tinted fog in a jar labeled ‘Delulu’, and the perfectly pleasant, utterly uninteresting beige glow he’d captured and titled ‘Beige Flag’. They were perfect, static records of fleeting feelings. And they suddenly felt like lies. They were trophies of moments, but the life had been drained from them in the process of capture.
He picked up an empty flask, the finest Venetian glass he owned. On a small, vellum label, he wrote a single word: ‘Authenticity’. He left the flask uncorked and placed it in the very center of his collection, a monument to the one thing he now knew could never be contained.
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