Month: June 2018

“Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach up and yank the ejection handle above my seat.” Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, p. 338.

* * *

Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach up and yank the ejection handle above my seat. It’s something you train for in drills. Accurately identifying the moment of no return. But nothing prepares you for what it feels like when you actually do it.

There was no simulator console blinking red, no soothing female voice congratulating me on making the most of an irretrievable situation or, more likely, explaining to me how I’d overreacted, needlessly abandoning a state-of-the-art flying machine to a fiery death, assigning me double simulation sessions to fine-tune my reflexes.

We all knew the training modules were programed to err on the side of saving the aircraft, not the rookie–or even the intermediate–pilot. Only when you’d logged hundreds of hours as a fleet runner did the balance begin to slowly shift, the zone in which the simulator recognized “eject and abandon craft” as a valid response to a catastrophic event begin to gradually expand.

But I don’t need a computer to tell me this much: if I hadn’t pulled that handle, I’d be dead right now; a smoldering hulk of charred wreckage at the bottom of this canyon.

I’ve had some time to think about it, sitting here in the escape pod, as it dangles from an impossibly thin strand of nylon, the last line connecting it to the parachute above me, caught in the only branch left on the only tree visible for miles around. At least, it used to be a tree. It’s now little more than a sand-blasted stump of bleached driftwood. It’s incredible, really, that that either the nylon thread or the tree’s branch has held the weight of my pod. That both have done so, for nearly two hours, as the wind turns the pod in slow concentric circles, out over the sheer cliff of the canyon and back again, is truly inexplicable.

As I think this, there is a sharp crack and the pod drops suddenly, just as it swings out over the void. My eyes squeeze shut, my heart leaps to my throat. But the thread holds.

That’s it, I tell myself. On the next in-swing I’m going to unbuckle my belt and slam myself as hard as I can against the floor of the pod. The thread is going to break eventually, and I’ll be damned if its going to do so while I’m dangling over 1000 meters of nothing and a rocky streambed.

“Children are very sensitive to injustice, you know.” The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood, p. 160.

* * *

“Children are very sensitive to injustice, you know.” The woman–Eugenia Fairfield, 67 years old, of 1137 Covent Lane–removed blue plastic gardening gloves with a faded print of red-hatted gnomes from her hands and smoothed her rumpled shorts. She wore the sort of woven straw sun visor peculiar to lady gardeners. It made a circular frame for the coils of glossy black hair shot through with silver that she’d piled up behind it. The officer’s eyes kept returning to that hair, marveling at the way the strands wove in and out of each other in loops and braids. It was like some intricate model of an atom or the solar system, with lines drawn in to show the orbits of even the smallest asteroids.

“And adults aren’t, would you say? Sensitive to injustice, I mean?” Officer Patterson asked absentmindedly as she filled out the lengthy incident report pinned to her clipboard. It was an art form, sustaining the bare minimum of conversation needed to keep a witness standing there, patiently waiting for all of the blanks to be filled and the applicable boxes checked. You wanted to keep them attentive, keep them talking, but stall any serious recitation of the facts until the appropriate moment, when you’d reached that portion of the form.

The officer had tried other methods, of course. At first she’d filled the various parts of the form out in any old order. But something always got missed that way. She tried scribbling notes in a flip notebook, like some sort of overeager novice reporter, then copying the information neatly into the form later, seated in the cramped squad car, between bites of marinara meatball sub. But inevitably at such times another call would come in. She’d wind up sitting at her desk long after her colleagues had left for the evening, baffled as to the meaning of some inscrutable notation from earlier in the day. No, this was the best way.

“I wouldn’t say they’re insensitive to it. Not all of them, at any rate. But a degree of complacency grows up, wouldn’t you say? You must observe that all the time, in your field …”

“Mmm. Hmm.” Officer Patterson wrote a bit faster, drawing firm diagonal lines through the portions of the form that didn’t seem to apply.

” … Take what happened here ….” She finally came to “Witness Account,” and following it, the tidy yet always insufficient block of seven horizontal lines.

“Yes. What did happen, Ms. Fairfield? In your own words.” She always added that. It was silly, but she had found it to be effective.”

“Well officer, I have to say, I’ve lived here 30 years and never seen anything like it.”

“It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been obtained.” From “Landor’s Cottage,” The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, p. 619.

* * *

It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been obtained. Sarah drew herself nose to nose with a tiny glass unicorn, one of dozens of figures standing on motionless display in a lit curio cabinet.

She turned and ran her index finger lightly along the frilly edge of a bedspread in the enormous doll house. In each room a doll–perfectly to scale–went about some business or another. The mother doll, with her graceful chignon and real lace collar, sat alone sipping coffee at a table set for twelve, her tiny chin raised slightly, her eyes far away, almost pensive. In the next room the father doll sat at a miniature rollback desk with a tiny green velvet blotter, head in hands, bent over a stack of papers with real writing on them. Sara imagined that, with a magnifying glass, she might be able to read the words on those pages–no bigger than postage stamps, thinner than tissue paper–and decipher a root cause for the gloom that pervaded the rooms of that make-believe house.

Beyond the dollhouse was a massive white wrought-iron bed covered in crisp white linens. The spread at first appeared polka-dotted, but on closer inspection was hand-embroidered with little baskets of purple flowers, each one slightly different from its neighbors. Hung from a hook on the ceiling was  a sheer white canopy with purple scalloped edges. Sarah drew it lightly aside to see, raised up against the pillows, an army of porcelain dolls, their eyes fixed forward beneath curving lashes. Some were old, dressed in pinafores and heeled boots, others looked almost modern, in saddle shoes and mini skirts.

Sarah sat carefully on the bed, wincing as it squeaked in objection to her weight.

She had not been in that many other girls’ rooms. There was Shelly Parker, who stood with Sarah at the bus stop each morning, half under and half outside of the rectangle of shade thrown by the awning of the life insurance company. The broker never had any clients that early but was against kids loitering on his doorstep just the same. Shelly’s family was born-again Christian, some sort of fundamentalist Baptist sect. They went to church three times a week, and Shelly’s room was decorated with Precious Moments figurines and framed prints of Thomas Kincaid paintings–warmly lit cottages hugged tight by gardens brimming with blue and pink hydrangeas and bud roses–an old person’s idea of what a young girl might like.

Tabitha Lamott’s room, she could see, was also heavy with adult notions of childhood. But it was also fascinating. With rekindled resolve, Sarah waited, hands in her lap, to meet her new friend.

“As with many illnesses, the cure is simple, once perceived.” Watership Down, by Richard Adams, p. 112.

* * *

As with many illnesses, the cure is simple, once perceived. To begin with, Sharon needed a sturdy table. And one morning–after scuttling the kids out the door to school, settling for wet hair and a shift dress, and heading for the train–the universe provided her with one. There, two houses down and across the alley, was one of those giant wooden spools for industrial cable, propped against a chain link fence an a utility pole. It was the sort of thing college kids would use for a coffee table. The girls Sharon had shared an apartment with all those years ago might actually have had one. She had a vague recollection of it, strewn with ashtrays and bottles of cheap beer.

Sharon approached the thing for a closer inspection. Then, looking first one way and then the other down the alley, she gave it an appraising kick. Nice. Solid. She hastily rolled it across the alley and through her back gate, depositing it in a forgotten corner of her yard. For good measure, she covered it with an old paint-streaked tarp before glancing with alarm at her watch and tripping off once more to the train.

Getting the thing into the basement the next day did not go at all according to plan. The “controlled roll” she had envisioned was, as it turned out, a physics lesson waiting to happen. As always, between gravity and things wheel-shaped, all was dispatched with no undue delay. There wasn’t much left for Sharon to do but stand back and, later, plaster over the rather large depression in the basement wall.

A week later the makeshift table was ensconced in its own little corner of Sharon’s basement, next to the dust-furred hulk of her husband’s old rowing machine and stacked milk crates full of memorabilia from track meets and dance recitals. The table was covered in an assortment of textiles, found objects, inks and dyes, adhesives of all kinds, and sketchbooks–stacks and stacks of dusty old, elastic-corded moleskin sketchbooks, each with the year printed neatly on the inside cover.

And it was in this way, like iron shavings dancing in the path of a magnet, that the scattered bits of Sharon Belthower began to collide and adhere to one another. An old energy stuttered to life and flowed, once again, up and down her arms, pooling into her fingertips, stiff and lethargic; fingers that had almost forgotten what it was to create.

“The man was cold as an albino frog.” Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, p. 104

* * *

“The man was cold as an albino frog.” What did that even mean, Shari wondered. Paul made the comment in an offhand way, in response to her first tentative questioning. His blunt aspect could signal an opening. It could just as well be a warning to change the subject. After ten months together, you would think she could read him.

They’d arrived at the same time, tucked themselves into the corner booth by the stairs, and ordered their usual Chianti and carbonara to split–a student’s date-night splurge. Shari was in the second year of her MFA program, spending long hours scribbling away in coffee shops or typing at the old desk she’d jammed into one corner of their studio apartment. Paul was a medical student. Today had been his team’s first day of dissection. A real human cadaver. Just like an 80’s movie. Gross Anatomy or Flatliners. Things hadn’t changed much. The best way to learn to write was still to sit down and write; the best way to learn about the human body was still to cut it open and look inside.

She was morbidly fascinated by the prospect. But the thing about the frog caught her off guard. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an albino frog. Much less felt one.”

“They had a tank full of them, in the bar I used to work at in Chicago. I had to fish out a dead one once.” She made a face. “People used to throw popcorn in. Not a good idea, apparently.”

Shari sipped her wine. She’d never actually seen a dead body. Animal or human. She kept picturing the white foamed rubber underside of Haribo frog gummies. And then that made her think of the waxy white sweet bricks of vanilla Tootsie Rolls, the blue-wrapped ones in the Halloween variety pack. She pictured a human figure composed of these two substances, scalpels slicing through it to reveal … what? Red raspberry filling? Breached cavities spilling rainbow-colored Nerds onto the metal table, coils of glistening red licorice, cloudy membranous sacs the color of blue raspberry blow pops, yellow and orange tissue spongy to the touch, like marshmallow circus peanuts.

“Hello? Earth to Shari.” Paul touched her hand gently. “Mind if we talk about something else? Trust me, it won’t do anything for your appetite.”

She smiled. “Of course. You’re probably starving.”

“I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?” Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, p. 268.

* * *

“I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?”

The man made a notation in one column of a steno book and, looking up, tucked the pencil behind his ear. It was an old Col-Erase, a copy-editor’s pencil, one end blue and the other red. Detective Markle hadn’t seen one of those in years.

His mother had edited the personal ads and obituaries in their local paper for decades. “All those people, Joey, seeking and seeking, never looking at what’s right in front of them.” He had a sudden vision of her, looking up from her desk, the blue tip of her pencil resting pensively on her lower lip. She’d had a drawer full of pencils like that, in slim little boxes, a dozen per box. Markle wondered if this man had a similar stash, hauled off from some going-out-of-business sale. Or maybe someone was still making the things, a rolling river of them dropping neatly from a conveyor belt , robotic hands pressing the gummed flaps of the boxes closed.

Markle resurfaced, shook his head slightly. He glanced longingly at the wisps of stem rising from the man’s coffee cup. It had been a long night.

“Well sir, the girl’s mother said she comes in here quite a bit.”

“She does. After school mostly. Sometimes on the weekends.”

“A bookworm huh?”

The man didn’t seem to think the comment required a response. Markle glanced around. It was a tight little shop, with dusty towers of used books spilling from makeshift shelves, piled so high in front of the windows that the place felt like a basement. It wasn’t someplace you would guess a junior-high-school girl would frequent.

“When would you say you saw her last?”

“Oh, I don’t know, about a week and a half ago? If you give me a second I can tell you.” The man licked his finger and rifled through the pages of the steno book. “Here, June 12. She bought this. Cash, of course.”

Markle looked. Seattle on Ten Dollars a Day.

“Seattle’s pretty far from here.”

“It is.”

“Would you please call me? If you see her. Her folks are real worried.” He handed the man his card.

“I’ll do that.”

* * *

The man waited until the tinkling bell over the door was silent, then said “You can come out now.”

The toes of two scuffed sneakers could be seen behind the stacks.

“He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm.” Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, p. 261.

* * *

He stopped, puzzled, and opened his hand, examined his palm. What she’d placed there, heavy and cool, folding his fingers around it and giving them a slight squeeze as she turned away, was a key.

Looking up, his eyes met hers for a split second, before she disappeared into the crush of people on the concourse. He made as if to follow her, but saw in an instant that it was hopeless. The crowd spilled forward, a river breaking free of a dam, down half a dozen platforms and onto waiting trains, some already whistling and chuffing, like racehorses anxious to start from their gates. He would not find her again. Not today.

He cursed himself, silently, for not grasping her arm, pulling her to him. He’d been afraid of making a scene. But with all this chaos, he might have gotten her safely away from  here.

It was a large brass key. Not modern. An old warded lock key, with a filigreed bow. The scrollwork there suggested, possibly, a stylized letter “G.” The rectangular bit was broad and flat, with little notched cutouts branching across its surface but never meeting, like a tiny map showing the dead-end passages of a garden maze. He had seen a key like this, once before.