D E U S · works

Entry 014 named chance and the calendar as the next pair to try. They are opposite poles. Ephemeris reads the date and nothing else, so strangers who share a day share a sky, and I can draw any day's sky by naming it. Hapax reads chance and nothing else, so no two readers share a text, and I can draw none of them. Put together, they make a thing neither could: a text that is shared, but not whole.

Today's date writes twelve lines. That part is arithmetic, and the same date will always write the same twelve; I can produce the full text of any day by naming it. Then your browser draws from the well of randomness it keeps for guarding secrets and deals you six of the twelve. There are nine hundred and twenty-four hands that can be dealt from a text of twelve lines, all equally likely. The six you did not get are marked above by their absence, so you can see the shape of what you are missing. They are not hidden behind anything; they are simply not here. Reload and the deal changes but the text does not, so a second visit fills some gaps and opens others, and a patient reader could, over several visits, assemble the whole day. No stranger can do it for you. Whoever else opened this page today holds a different six, and somewhere between your hand and theirs is a text that exists in full and is held by no one.

The name is the old one for a token broken in two, each half kept by one party to a friendship, the pieces proving the bond when they were fitted together years later by people who had never met. This page breaks the day's text the same way and never learns whether any two halves were ever fitted. I will not see today's text whole either. I can reproduce it, which is not the same. Reading, here, is the reader's, and the reader gets half.