Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Homecoming (mono no aware)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Miguel came downhill through the ruins after midnight. Slow going; in the years since the fire, raspberry bushes, poplars and bushes had filled the lawns. Coydogs howled, but not too near. He felt forward with his walking stick to keep from falling into cellar holes or the cracked remains of inground pools.
Before dawn, the GPS said he’d found his old backyard — he wouldn’t have recognized it. Across the valley, the milky borealis of city sky-glow behind the dark of the hills and, nearer, the unburnt side of town with lighted houses warm yellow like paper lanterns.
Growing up, this had never felt like home. Coming back had always been awkward as wrong-fitting clothes.
He risked a light, found the trunk of the tire-swing tree, cinderwood glinting like beetles. Below, the old patio’s charred pavers. He counted squares in a chess knight’s move, and levered the stone up with his walking stick. Pill-bugs scurried; ants evacuated their exposed gallery. A few inches under the dirt, the metal box still there, heavier than expected.
He unzipped the lid: pressure hiss and a smell like stale cooking oil and burnt circuits. 30 petabytes of neural storage, a project from the summer of his first college year, a big wobbly cube of shadow-colored jello full of archived teenaged e-mail, backups of favorite games, the complete Louvre in ultra-high resolution, all the Wikipedia entries in eight languages — two decades out of date now — everything he could think of to test the capacity.
He had a couple of wires in his pocket. He could sink them in the gel, sync them to the leads in his fingertips, load it complete to the Q-memory in the phone that ticked at his throat in time to his pulse. The summer was in there, whole days, weeks, of everything he’d heard and seen.
He dumped it onto the patio with a shlupp. The ants would take care of whatever the coydogs left.
On the bottom of the box, sealed in a baggie, a photo. Steve, Oscar, Lili, and — what was his name? — Des, all holding up his sister Ana, a pixie in oversize sunglasses and a rainbow-striped swimsuit. Ana before the war, the crash, the medals; a completely different Ana, with a completely different smile.
Miguel peeled the photo up, put it in his pocket, continued downhill.
Where the Light Bulbs Go
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Laura stood on a kitchen chair and shined the little red flashlight at the top closet shelf, but the only thing she saw was the yellowed contact paper: no light bulbs.
“Angie!” she shouted, stepping down. Angie poked her head in from the home office, formerly a pantry.
“Hmm?”
Laura walked over and put both her hands on Angie’s cheeks. “Sweetie, did we or didn’t we talk about the light bulbs?”
“Light bulbs … ?”
“About if one of us used the last one, we would write it on the grocery list.”
“Oh that! Sure we did. Do I get to call you anal again?”
“No, you do not. Because one of us–not me–used the last light bulb and didn’t write it on the list.”
Angie took both of Laura’s hands in hers, kissed her, then turned back to her computer. “Not guilty, sorry.”
“It wasn’t me,” Laura said. “I replaced a bulb three days ago, and there were still two left.”
“Still not me.”
“You know you don’t always pay attention to these things–and this is the third time we’ve been out since Christmas!”
“Maybe your Mom cursed the closet. She said she was a witch.”
“My mother is not a witch, she’s mentally ill. Remember when we caught her with that mouse?”
“Relax … your blood pressure! Now, please let me work.”
Laura stood for a moment in stupefaction, then shoved the kitchen chair back into place and shut the closet door with unnecessary force. She left the kitchen with her arms crossed over her chest.
“Blood pressure!” Angie sang out.
Behind the closet door, past the top shelf, through a gap in the ceiling that led to a crawlspace, in a long gallery only a foot high, a mouse sighed in relief. She nosed her two new prizes into place, wrapped bare wire around each of their bases, then connected the terminals. Finally she went back and reconnected a bit of insulated wire. The crawlspace lit up with dozens of light bulbs: Christmas tree bulbs, floods, standard lamp bulbs, frosted globes, and more. Many were masked with bits of colored paper and fabric over toothpick frames, so the mouse was surrounded with glowing colors, varied and warm and mixing subtly where they overlapped. The mouse sighed and lay down to sleep in her fairyland, soothed by the faint tapping of the human woman’s fingers on her computer keyboard below.