The magic beans

In a recent film version of Jack and the Beanstalk, the bush leads the boy to a kingdom of ogres whose hearts are made of stone.

I place my hand on the beating organ and hear a muffled rumble.

The suggestion makes me feel like a polished granite beneath a smooth marble mantle.

I try to hide it so my family doesn't notice.

Maybe they've already noticed and are hiding it too, in a play of mirrors and projections.

All this stone stuff has awakened my memory.

A work memory, but a memory nonetheless.

Perhaps part of the pettiness you become with a heart of stone consists of ending up reduced to this kind of memory: a quarry where you work to extract a few pebbles and boulders.

I worked on a digital solution to offer natural stone catalogs online and thus make buying and selling between companies easier.

The first five months they built a ship for a world without water, thus feeding the mountain of waste on which this industry thrives.

After that, it was time to do the same old thing: throw ourselves into reality and let ourselves learn.

We toured towns in Brazil with a cardboard Pinocchio.

While we showed it off in factories and warehouses, we experienced internet connection problems and watched as our fondest wishes died before they were born.

The photos they took didn't have high resolution, they didn't save them, and they didn't do everything we wanted them to do just because we had imagined it would.

Blessed and cruel reality.

So much waste.

This little heart of stone growing inside me could be the titanic effort of my conscience revolting in the face of so many antigens.

Immune titans.

Ogres.