In our very first conversation, Dustin told me he had a 3D printer on order. He'd invested on Kickstarter; the printers hadn't been manufactured yet. He was drawing lines in the dust of our mutual friend's bookshelf. When he lifted his wine glass, he kept his dusty finger straightened, pointing, like an explorer conquering land. Now, here is a forward-thinking man, I thought. Here is an imaginative man. Here is a risk-taking sort of man.

A year later, the company officially behind schedule, he still spoke of 3D printers with exuberance—their countless applications, their potential to change the world. What a patient man, I thought. What an easygoing man. What a remarkable man.

The company was called Fabricateur. Their website featured pensive-looking actors nodding at blueprints and watching plastic rise like soufflé.

"Don't they just need to make one?" I said.

I'd stopped by his place on my way home from the library. An armful of graphic novels weighed down my canvas tote, straining the straps. Dustin smiled and relieved me of the bag. I wasn't sure he got my joke. His reception of my jokes always remained mysterious.

I went home, lay on my couch, and tried not to think about 3D printers. I stroked the inside of my thigh until it tickled and I had to scratch. I tugged my hair at the roots, just to feel the resistance of it.

Once the printer finally arrived, Dustin lauded me with gifts. All were practical items. Mostly, they were things that could hold other things. A pencil holder embossed with symbols of my astrological sign, Sagittarius. A heart-shaped flower pot. Monogrammed towel rings. I didn't need or want any of these things, but understood they meant a lot to him, these objects he'd summoned into existence for me. I arranged them on my lap, a tiny sculpture garden I could look at from a celestial viewpoint.

That was the summer I exclusively read comics and graphic novels. Novels and newspapers proved daunting; my eyes got lost in sand dunes of text. But little frames I could affix my mind to. I pored through panels, usually skipping over dialogue. I flipped through pages so fast I imagined I could smell the previous readers—their musty pheromones, their salty scents.

Dustin pestered me for modeling ideas. Was there anything I wanted reproduced? I finally told him about the earrings I'd lost. Here was my opportunity to come clean. He'd bought them for me in Niagara Falls on our first trip together. I'd lost both at the same time.

"All you need is one," Dustin said, plunging his hands into his couch. "Bet I can find them."

I didn't think so.

I said, "If anyone could, you could."

I'd mentioned the earrings casually, before we ordered takeout at his apartment.

"Too bad you don't have a backup file," Dustin said. "What were they made of, again?"

"Silver," I said. "Or something like it."

"The replicas won't be silver," said Dustin. "But we can paint them."

In Niagara, we did magic mushrooms and giggled at dinosaur mini-golf. We wandered through Ripley's Believe It or Not like lost children. We gaped at rainbow falls, at the chambers of color morphing inside cascading ribbons. It was the first time he said "love," "you," and "I"—a clip of three bullets, fired in quick succession. The fiery Ferris wheel orbited in Dustin's eyes as burning circles. He looked like an anime character, his hair spiked with wind, his eyes and mouth ever-expanding with raw desire, fear and love. If he always looked that way, maybe I'd found something worth preserving.

The earrings probably were in a couch. But not his couch. Probably, they had fallen into the abrasive fabric of my ex-boyfriend's couch, which typically left an angry flush on my skin.

"If you only find one, don't throw it away," Dustin said.

There he was, a big, burly man crawling around on his hands and knees, looking for a worthless pair of earrings he would never find. He searched until the sun went down, until after all the good takeout places had closed. He kept smiling at me in a defeated way, like he'd just returned from battle.

I called for pizza. It wasn't the best pizza place, but it was still open. Through his window, the city was dark, yellow lights shimmering with quiet anxiety.

Dustin winked at me over a slice of veggie. "What a wonderful lady," he said. "Truly one of a kind."

"They threw away the mold," I said.

Not long after, he gave me a set of plastic blue rings arranged in a metal box, each a different size. Instead of trying them on, I imagined hiding these rings inside different couches, distributing them among apartments. But I didn't. I lacked the imagination, you see? I couldn't picture following through.

In the coming months, I took to pressing a dulled pencil into my leg, making uniform polka dots on my skin. Small bruises blossomed into overlapping black discs, which I examined on our couch beside stacks of comic books and armies of plastic miniatures, by the waning winter sun.


.

Kristen Swan Morrison is in the MFA program at the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared in Grain.

Read her postcard.

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