Matji & Co.Series 1 · Episode 2
The spill
A pinch of green nano dust. One matcha. Four small somethings blinking in the foam.
It happens on a Tuesday, as the important things here generally do. Mutjo is carrying the little jar in one hand and a fresh bowl of matcha in the other, which is exactly one hand too few.
A pinch of green dust tips into the drink. The foam shivers. Then it clumps — soft, chewy, deliberate — and a small square face rises out of the bowl and looks about itself with large, astonished eyes.
It looks at Mutjo. Mutjo looks at it. The newcomer makes its first sound — a bright “Matji!” — and is answered from the foam, which surprises everyone present, the bowl included. Matji is what Mutjo comes to call their kind; each of them, in time, reveals a name of its own.
By evening there are four of them, sitting in a row on the counter, watching him whisk. Mutjo — not, it must be said, a man given to excitement — smiles for the first time in a very long while. I remember the day. The whole street does now.
