The Tale of the Missing Third
Being an account, only partly reliable, of the Re‑Relationship of the World, compiled by several witnesses, none of whom quite agreed on their own names. (Ed)
Once upon a time, long before the beginning became fashionable, the world was cracked like an egg and half-boiled by philosophy. It had only just settled into its shape—clouds where clouds should be, mountains pretending to be significant, and oceans practising grandeur—when a rumour escaped from the Cave and made its way into daylight. The rumour said that every creature was once part of a whole, long ago and far away, before someone (usually blamed on Zeus, Committee for Cosmic Division and Lightning) took a chisel to creation and split everything neatly down the middle.
The halves, so the story went, were doomed to search for each other ever after, wandering the world like sentimental furniture seeking the rest of its upholstery. Plato heard this in a tavern near Piraeus, wrote it down, and felt extremely pleased with himself. But, as is true of most philosophers, he forgot the important part: he forgot the relation between.
No one noticed at first. People were too busy looking for someone to complete them. Whole generations ran about with tape measures, soul-lanterns, and romantic expectations. You could hardly walk through a marketplace without stepping over impromptu proposals involving strangers who merely looked symmetrical. Meanwhile, under the stones and behind the stars, something sighed—the Missing Third, the space between halves that had once kept them from clinging too tightly.
For the Third was not person but connection: the idea of “between,” the invisible corridor along which understanding travels, often tripping over its feet. Without it, reunion was sticky, conversations circular, and marriages very brief. The elves noticed it first, being excellent listeners and abysmal conversationalists. “There is an echo missing,” said their Queen. “When I speak, no air listens.” The dwarves dismissed this as acoustics. The dwarves were not known for subtle metaphysics; they considered the universe perfectly solid until it broke their tools.
Then came a series of peculiar events. Two-headed lions argued with themselves for centuries, certain they were united yet feeling curiously divided. Rivers flowed uphill looking for their other half, leaving valleys confused and quite damp. Even the moon, eternally self-reflective, began complaining that she couldn’t remember which side was hers. “Everything’s paired but badly,” she said. “It’s like socks after laundry day.”
A celestial committee was convened, comprising the representatives of all fabulous creatures—dragons (fire division), phoenixes (rebirth subcommittee), mermaids (marine liaison), and one very tired sphinx who had been asked to provide secretarial services because she had the neatest handwriting. They sat upon the cloud known as Rationalisation Nine and attempted to investigate the disappearance of the Third.
They produced minutes, manifestos, and many sandwiches. The dragons argued that the Missing Third must be a thing—something visible, weighable, possibly edible. The mermaids disagreed, claiming that relation itself was fluid, and one could not bite the sea. The phoenix, always inconveniently dying at inopportune moments, interjected only between lives, making consensus difficult. By the time order was restored, several centuries had elapsed and the sandwiches were fossils.
Finally the sphinx, who had waited politely, cleared her throat and said, “Perhaps the Third is merely what happens when two things stop demanding certainty.” This was recorded in the minutes as “cryptic nonsense.”
Still, the idea escaped and began to circulate. Grass whispered it to wind, wind muttered it to water, and soon even mountains were murmuring about “what exists between.” Mortals, being naturally susceptible to overheard ideas, began to feel the tremor of absence. Lovers discovered that their happiness existed not in finding one another but in the invisible interval where they reached out. Philosophers called emergency conferences, which solved nothing, though several of them married their notes.
Then the gods decided to intervene, which never ends well. They scoured heaven for the Third, overturning stars, dredging galaxies, and misplacing several meteor belts in the process. Eventually they discovered a faint trail leading to the Bureau of Celestial Administration (Complaints and Ironies Division). There, buried under twenty-seven forms of cosmic negligence, lay a memo:
“Re: Concept of Relation. Filed provisionally as ‘Metaphysical Excess.’ Archivation recommended. No action taken.”
The gods declared a mixed victory and held a celebration which lasted a millennium. Unfortunately they forgot to invite the mortals, who therefore learned only that their prayers echoed longer than usual. The Missing Third remained missing.
And so the world continued, slightly off-key. Yet from this incompleteness, new species evolved. The unicorn, for instance—nature’s attempt to create unity by adding unnecessary horns. The basilisk, trapped eternally staring into its own half-eyes. The duck, caught halfway between water and sky, muttering ancient colloquies of equilibrium. (Ducks are philosophers, only less arrogant.) Every so often one of them would look up at the clouds and remember, dimly, the absent middle that had once taught things how to meet without colliding.
In a village that no longer appears on any map—because maps cannot abide ambiguity—there stood a trunk beneath a clock that ran on both time and uncertainty. Inside lived a Librarian of Lost Relations (one of the few remaining civil servants of existence). Each day she filed the world’s missing “betweens”—the gap between cause and effect, the hush between heartbeat and echo, the space between tea poured and tea drunk. Her shelves stretched indefinitely. According to her reports, the backlog was astonishing and growing worse. None of her supervisors replied because, technically, correspondence itself was one of the missing things.
Sometimes travellers stumbled in and asked for advice. She would hand them a mirror and say, “Look carefully until you see someone else.” Most were disappointed. One or two, understanding, left lighter. Whether they found the Third thereafter no one recorded; the Librarian, bound by bureaucratic privacy clauses, is not permitted to disclose outcomes.
It is said—by poets, who are unreliable yet occasionally useful—that when two souls truly meet, the universe pauses, holding its breath just long enough for a tiny figure made of possibility to slip back in through the crack. This, perhaps, is the Third returning home by stealth.
Or perhaps not. The gods’ accounting ledgers now list “relation” as both asset and liability, a sort of metaphysical overdraft they cannot reconcile. Philosophers hold committees to define it; magicians sell counterfeit versions to royalty as potions of unity (“contents may settle during transcendence”). Meanwhile, ducks continue their endless reasoning across ponds, discussing balance as if it were gossip.
If you should meet one—polishing its feathers and considering eternity—I advise you to listen. Ducks guard the edges of meaning. They remember that halves are fine things, but between them lies the pond, and without the pond neither half floats at all.
That, in summary, is the story of the Missing Third: the part of everything that allows anything to make sense of itself. And like most important things, it was mislaid during routine cosmic tidying and has been turning up, quietly, ever since—between laughter and listening, between doorframe and door, between this sentence and the next.
Now there is nothing left to add, except perhaps the observation—casually spoken and therefore vital—that the kettle has boiled dry again, which on rereading you may find is rather important. For every story must pause somewhere, and the relation between stories is silence; and that, one suspects, is where the Third still lives, humming softly under its breath, waiting for two halves to notice it’s the steam.
You are here: States of Grace > Fables