Archive for the ‘Series’ Category
The Magic Black Belt
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Dana Yamamoto was the worst martial artist in school. When she first stepped on the mat, Mirabelle Hayes jeered, “Are you dead?”
Dana didn’t challenge her to a duel. She just blushed and hunched.
“She means you’ve got your gi on backwards,” Samantha MacKinnon said. “Left side over right. You put the right side over the left on a dead person.”
Nobody told her that at least one girl a year stepped on the mat dressed as a dead person.
She drove her sparring partners wild, the way her hands shook like the Mars lander.
The day she tore her gi pants for the sixth time, Hepplewater Sensei followed her into the dressing room. She settled across from Dana, who sat mending the gusset with Mars lander hands.
“Must be hard, being the daughter of a general,” said Sensei.
“Yes, Sensei.”
“She expects a great deal of you, I imagine.”
“Yes, Sensei.”
“And what do you want?”
Dana looked up.
“I w-want to be the best student in the school,” she blurted out. “And,” she added, shocking herself further, “I want to th-throw Mirabelle Hayes all the way across the mat.”
“Hurt her, you mean?” Sensei Hepplewater asked.
“No. Just throw her.”
Sensei nodded. Dana thought to herself, this is where Sensei decides to train me in secret, or gives me a magic black belt. Or sends me on a quest to a distant mountain, so I come back able to fight off six attackers and fly over the roofs. She waited.
“You can be the best student in the school, though what that means may change for you. And you can throw Hayes all the way across without hurting her. But you must do one thing.”
“What?” Dana’s hands shook even more than usual.
“Keep training.”
Hepplewater Sensei left the dressing room. Dana stitched and cried, and left an hour later. She lay awake all night thinking and crying, so that the next day she arrived so tired that she broke her wrist taking falls, and had to sit on the bench for three months.
“Do I have to watch class every day, Sensei?” she pleaded.
“Yes,” replied Hepplewater Sensei.
She sat and watched, every day. When she returned to the mat, she threw Samantha MacKinnon halfway across it.
“Your hands don’t shake anymore,” accused Mirabelle Hayes as she came in for the attack.
“Th-they don’t,” agreed Dana.
Hotel Antarctica
Monday, November 16th, 2009
Jake jerked his head up. He’d been drooling. He wiped his face on his sleeve, looked around, then saw the message flashing on the screen. The scanning electron microscope had finally finished pumping down. They really needed that new machine.
He groggily clicked thru the startup procedure, finally got an image of the sample. One am. He had 6 hours left till anyone else had the machine scheduled.
Zoom in, focus, zoom in, focus, Jake was reading license plates before it registered that he’d imaged a city on an antarctic meteorite. One of those meteorites that, mineralogically, seemed to have come from Mars.
Jake excitedly scanned the rock surface. The city covered a good part of it. This was incredible! Forget the thesis. Nature, Science, a Nobel prize!
Jake feverishly scanned and photographed streets full of dwellings, temples, public buildings, focusing in on smaller and smaller details. Fountains, park benches, things that could be statues or streetlights, even people. Hundreds of people, all froxen in place, the monochromatic SEM display reminding him of the ash people of Pompeii.
“This stupid machine,” Jake grumbled. No matter how he focused or adjusted the stigmation he could not resolve facial features. He became obsessed with getting the perfect shot. Backscatter electrons didn’t help. He tried an alternative view and suddenly, one of the faces swam into focus. It had a pair of wide-spaced oblong eyes, a thin, sharp nose, and a wide mouth. The martian looked up at Jake, beckoned with a finger.
Jake began to doubt, for the first time, that he was awake.
—
“I don’t know,” Sara said. “Jake was supposed to be on overnight. I unlocked the door, and the place was a mess.”
“Ew. His clothes are here.” Jili poked her foot at the crumpled jeans and T-shirt that lay on the floor between the chair and the SEM. The worksurface was littered with empty Mountain Dew cans, candy wrappers, and a spiral notebook, open to a blank page. “He doesn’t use a laptop?”
“No, and it doesn’t even look like he was working last night. He didn’t take any photographs. Do you suppose he ran out of here naked?”
Jili woke up the screen. “He’s got a sample in there, but at such a high power and so out of focus you can’t see a thing. Well, let’s clean up and get to work.”
end