Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Ike’s Word
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
The old woman sits on her stoop and dispenses words. Nobody really remembers when she first arrived, but Mister Rainey, who’s retired now, went to her when he was in second or third grade. She said one word that changed him forever. She never spoke to him again, he says.
It’s like that. Parents take their kids to the old woman. She won’t say anything if they stay to listen, but once a child is alone with her she will look them over. From head to toe, from leftmost finger to rightmost, from skin on in.
Then she whispers a word.
I never got a word. We moved to Harlem when I was ten, and my parents didn’t even know about the old woman until Ike was almost too old. Now I’m fifteen, he’s nine, and we’re standing on the curb looking at her. The ice cream truck has just passed, and she’s gumming a rocket pop.
Ike followed me around every day, idolizing me, wanting nothing more than to be me. It’s annoying, it’s flattering, it’s what little brothers have done since time began.
Something will happen to Ike when he gets his word. He’ll be different, an individual. That scares me. I don’t want us to grow apart. I’ve had my fights with dad and mom, but Ike’s my brother and always will be. At least that’s how I think it is. What he might think after getting his word I don’t know. I reach for his shoulder, to turn him around so we can leave.
She looks up. Ignoring me, she glances at Ike and it’s as if she says, “Come here, boy.”
He walks to her. She sits there and she runs the rocket pop around her gums and she looks at him. Bit by bit and all over she examines him.
She leans forward. So does he, until his ear is next to her mouth. She pulls the pop out and lets it drip. Then I see her lips move. He steps back and turns.
A new Ike looks out of his eyes. He’s looking at me almost the way the old woman looked at him. Then he smiles. “Let’s get ice cream,” he says.
He leads the way down the street to where the truck waits.
The Cube and the Cantilever
Monday, July 5th, 2010
The cube, immense and radiant, just appeared in the middle of the Bonneville salt flat and hovered about half a mile from the rest stop on I-80, which was as close as FEMA and army would let any of us get.
The rest stop was an atomic modern sweep of shade-bearing cantilevered wings, its now-retro futurism rendered quaint by the appearance of the cube in its utter simplicity and future-changingness.
The military brought Iraq-tested tents; the television crews, air-conditioned RVs. Us net journalists sweltered and unfurled our bedrolls in the back seats of our dust-covered cars. By some unspoken covenant, the rest stop was left empty, neutral territory where we exchanged wary small talk between briefings.
Which was fine by me. I’d arrived the day before the cube to photograph the rest stop for a mid-century design blog. I was supposed to get shots every fifteen minutes–more often at dawn or dusk. Kind of a Monet haystack thing.
So I was the first one posting shots of the cube, and that got us an unreal number of hits. I filed reports every hour on the hour, and all the pics I could snap. By the end of the first week, they were paying me more per day than I’d made in the last month.
It all went along in a sort of routine for six weeks–I couldn’t leave, because the powers that be weren’t issuing any new press passes, and we wouldn’t have had a shot at them if they were. Every few days, the scientists tried some new ploy. After the first couple ineffectual beams, shorted-out robot drones, and spontaneously combusting probe gizmos, it got a little repetitive, but we still got decent hits.
Then someone–no one later ever wanted to admit exactly who–decided to level the rest stop to make way for a hypersonic echo-imaging array.
So I chained myself to the nearest column and waited to face down the bulldozer.
Which never came, because the aliens chose that moment to reveal themselves, levitating down in silver-foil spacesuits with ridiculous 50’s sci-fi movie antennae.
Mid-century modern, it turned out, bore an uncanny resemblance to the design of their holiest shrines, and the I-80 rest stop had become a place of pilgrimage via the teletransport temple inside the cube.
Which was how I became ambassador to another world, and never again lacked for blog content.