Category Archives: Science Fiction

Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Monday, July 20, 2009

Except for a few details, this is a true accounting
of actual events as told to the WordFeeder by one of the principals
in the story you are about to read. The embedded birth certificate has
been redacted to protect the identity of one of the principals
and his family, but is nonetheless real.

“So did ja read it yet?” It was Stallings habit to come into his colleague’s office without knocking, and tonight was no exception. Knocking conveyed a certain respect that might suggest that he and you were equal, and that wasn’t something he would ever concede.

“Read what?” Penelope responded, not bothering to look up. Looking up would let her intruder conclude that he could command her attention which he could, but only if she let him.

There’s was a world in which everything counted.

They had slept together… Wait. No, that’s too romantic a way to put it. More like they had sex together once over a year ago. Her team had been going nonstop, around the clock on a special project. No sleep. Lots of pizza. They both needed a break and took it on her couch. Twenty minutes later, they were back to work.

“This,” he told her, throwing a classified file on her desk, causing the two short piles she had in front of her to mush together as it landed, covering up the form she was filling out when he’d walked in.

“Hey!! You think maybe you shouldn’t piss off the superior who writes your evaluations?!” Her voice was calm enough, but she wasn’t kidding… and he knew it. “What is this?” she asked, still not looking at him, turning in her chair to put her shoeless feet, crossed at her ankles, on the corner of her desk she kept clear for just that reason.

“An entry level NSA researcher picked it up off some guy’s family blog when it tested positive for the query we sent them.”

“Remind me…”

“The one that looks for references to suspect births, 1940 to 1950, that meet the profile our psycho-bananas consultant gave us.

“You know, I’ve never seen him without his lab coat.” It was rhetorical observation not meant to solicit a response, her eyes skimming the disclaimer on the cover sheet, paying special attention to the signatures of those who had seen it recently. “Where was this one?”

“Oklahoma. 1946. It was part of a memoir written by his mother when she was gravely ill, about a time when she was a delivery nurse, just after the war. Take a look. I’ll get us some coffee.” And he left.

Opening the folder, it seemed for a moment that she couldn’t move her eyes off the title, but she did and read the copy of the handwritten text the blogger had published. His mother was from an age before computers, and had never learned to type. Her penmanship was steady, deliberate and easy to read despite the woman’s advanced age and condition.

Oklahoma City, November 20, 1946, just after 10 AM.

It had been a slow shift since I had come on at 8 when it was still cool enough that the air flowing from the open double doors at the end of the corridor near the maternity ward made the place bearable. Later on that day, not even the large floor fans we had would keep me and the other staff from perspiring through the starched white outfits which were required wearing at the time. I remember that day because it was unseasonably hot, but mostly because of the one military couple that came in from Tinker Field whose delivery made me question what I believed and, more importantly, what I didn’t. You know, son, I’ve never been a particularly religious person. Looking back now that I face the end of me, this is the one event in all the years that makes me question whether or not I might have missed something.

They were in their early thirties. He was a Captain in new Air Force they created after the war. With nothing more than a simple infirmary on the base, he had taken the chance to drive his wife to our hospital, fearing that, if it was a problem delivery, the corpsmen at Tinker wouldn’t be able to handle it. It was a risky decision given her condition and the distance, but these were determined people. The mother, in particular, was going to have her child, regardless of the cost. What irony that the Captain had survived three years in the war unscathed, only to come back to have his wife’s life threatened by something so routine as the birth of their second child.

She was a slight woman, barely 5 feet tall, weighing just 100 pounds before she had become pregnant. Labor had actually started more than a day earlier, slowly, with its intensity and the timing of contractions coming and going unevenly. When she arrived, we found her in agony, writhing in pain. The child, still inside her, was huge relative to her size, and was cavorting, turning and rolling, fighting to get out. Nowadays, they would have done a Cesarean, but not then. For whatever reasons, the doctor agreed to a vaginal birth.

As was the habit at that time, the Captain stayed in the waiting room while his wife fought alone, with the doctor, me and another nurse, to push out her son. After what wasn’t more than 20 minutes, the wife began to deteriorate, the medications we had given her having done little to resolve the difficult situation in which she and her baby found themselves. Even without the monitors and other technology we have now, it was clear they were both in serious trouble. Sending the other nurse for a second doctor to assist him if necessary, the attending went into the waiting room, just outside, to speak to the Captain.

So quickly had the doctor been moving that the swinging door to the delivery room had become stuck open, and I could see the Captain rising to his feet. Fearing the loss of the baby, or the mother, or both, the doctor asked the Captain, if it were it necessary to make the choice, should he save his wife or child. It was a question he had to ask, given the religious beliefs of some of our patients, but these were Jewish people and I’m not sure it was a problem for them. I remember the Captain looking past the doctor, into the delivery room, the full weight of what he would say clear on his face. “You save my wife, doctor,” he said without the least uncertainty in his voice, turning his head to face the physician to make sure his decision was clear. “Save my wife.” (I remember wondering later if I would ever hear a more profound statement of love given what he stood to lose. Whatever his beliefs, they served him well.) His voice was resolute, its sound hanging in the warm air while his eyes followed the doctor who rushed back into the delivery room, the second doctor and the other nurse almost running down the hall right behind him.

Half an hour later, it was over. The lifeless body of their son lay unceremoniously on bloody towels in a tray on a table along the far wall while we continued to help the mother. The other nurse, so affected by the loss of the child, left to start the paperwork, so she said, but no one could blame her, and I did my job trying not to look up and across the room.

It was then, son, a full five, maybe 10 minutes after the delivery, that I heard… no felt is more like it, the sound of a hand reaching into my head, as if to pull my mind toward it. I felt panic and fear, not that I had felt before, but what I realize now was the dread and sadness of pending death. I felt life slipping away uncontrollably – I cannot, even today, explain the power of this calling, the memory of which time has done nothing but enhance. – and found myself drawn away from the wife, semi-conscious on the delivery table, to the baby, still motionless where the doctor had laid him to rest.

What I did next was by compulsion, by the instructions of an unseen intelligence, something so primal and yet so compelling, I had no choice. Picking up the child, still wet from the delivery, I shook it violently, back and forth in front of me, and then I stopped. The doctors were no doubt alarmed, but I wasn’t paying attention, not to them, still holding the body of the baby a foot in front of me. And then, as if nothing had happened, his head shook back and forth on its own, his eyes, never cleaned after birth, opened, and his color began to normalize, his legs and arms beginning to move normally. And the fist in my head went away as suddenly as it had arrived.

I was surprised, pleasantly so, to find out years later that the child had not only survived, but appeared to be normal in all respects and, in fact, quite intelligent. You had to have been there, son. Far from thinking these to be the ravings of a sick old woman, it was, as you’re fond of saying, an experience you can take to the bank. I’ve seen an old photostat of his birth certificate, the word “stillborn” typed in, then crossed out. (I’ve enclosed that copy for you to see. Take good care of it.) Make what you want of what I have told you, but it was real and says something, although I don’t know what, about the human condition and about a certain power we may all have within us.

“Well,” Stallings asked on his way back into her office, the frosted glass door to her office still closing behind him. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s a curious story, that we should get a copy of the birth certificate and see where it takes us, but that Beaker,” her pet name for their scientist consultant, “has his pocket protector up his ass.”

“Here,” he said, reaching across her desk to hand her the coffee he promised, the sound of his voice muffled by the oversized bite of the cinnamon bun he was holding. “Want some?”

“What, after you’ve had your mouth on it?”

“That didn’t used to bother you.”

“Jeeze, you’re so repulsive sometimes,” she spoke honestly and quickly which was always her style. “What about the birth certificate?” She didn’t have time for his nonsense.

“Gone. Missing. The son never got it, and the original’s long gone.”

“Okay, trace the kid through his father’s military record. There couldn’t have been that many Jewish Captains at Tinker Field on that day in November. And do it yourself,” meaning, as Stallings knew she did, that he should keep it to himself, entirely on computer if possible, without hinting at the importance of any inquiries he’d have to make.

“I’ll take care of it. …You don’t buy this theory about near death birth experiences, do you?” Stallings asked a serious question, trying to get back into her good graces by focusing on the task at hand.

“Beaker says that there’s a kernel of intelligence, a core life force in our brains that is the last thing of us to die, that cries out at the end in one last desperate attempt to get help. That I’m willing to buy, but can a near death event ignite something, some special capability in an infant? Can that child grow up, perfecting its ability to reach out to other minds, to become our mission’s target?”

“The one that comes and goes, and can never be killed?” Stallings recited the popular legend. “The one with telepathic powers and who can move things with his mind?”

“Yeh, that one. Telepathy, maybe, using very low power bio-chemically produced electromagnetic waves, having perfected his ability to control and interpret their frequencies. Maybe. Telekinesis, on the other hand would require substantial forces way beyond what any human can produce outside the SyFy channel.” Clearly annoyed by it all, she was busy reorganizing the papers on her desk. “I think it’s an agency myth and that we’re wasting my team’s time and money. Now get the fuck out of here and do your job.”

Standing up from the chair in the front of her desk, taking one last look at the front of the sleeveless t-shirt was wearing – because he was a creep and couldn’t help himself – he turned toward the door only to be surprised by the man, in his early 60s, standing inside Penelope’s office just a few feet in front of him. “Who.. When did you…,” and his mind went blank, his body, limp but still standing.

“Wait over there,” the man said pointing to the open space on the wall next to the bookcases. And that’s exactly what Stallings did, hugging the wall, his shoulders down as if he had been shamed by his third grade teacher, Mrs. Cronmiller, and told to stand in the corner.

“Hi, honey.”

“Hey, Dad.” By the smile on her face and way her eyes opened, it was clear she was glad to see him, although they talked frequently, even if there was no phone or e-mail involved. Even now, just in case someone was listening, everything he said and she asked or answered was in their heads, mind to mind. A sort of dampening field he radiated allowed him to move unnoticed by those who would see him. Her agency records said she had been adopted by a wonderful couple, now diseased, but made no mention of the man being her biological father.

“Is bozo going to be a problem?” he needed to know, for his own safety and hers as well.

“No. He won’t remember any of this, just what I want him to recall, and he won’t follow up. Besides, I’ve already fixed Grand Daddy’s military records.”

“Thanks, honey. Anything you need me to look into for you?”

“A couple of things. Why don’t you buy me dinner at that roadhouse you love, where the band is too loud for anyone to hear us, and we’ll talk about it?”

And he smiled back, knowing it would, as always, be the highlight of his day. Looking at Stallings, still standing there in the corner, he turned and opened the door, sending Agent Bozo through it and back to his office without his suspecting or remembering a thing.

-wf

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Copyright as of the title date or earlier, by me.
(I write the WordFeeder blog.)  All rights reserved.
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Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Printable version… Memo to Carolyn PDF

Metamorphosis. In Biology, a profound change in form from one stage to the next in the life history of an organism.

Except for a few details, this is a true story.

The doorbell rang unexpectedly that unseasonably cool, gray Sunday morning. “I’ll get it,” she said to Jack who was busy looking through the Best Buy flier in the morning paper he’d brought back from the store down at the corner. Walking from the kitchen to answer it, past the boxes she and her husband had yet to unpack, Carolyn looked though their bay window, wishing it would start raining already and get it over with. She was numb, having been unable to sleep the night before.

“Yes,” was all she could manage to say as she opened their front door to see a woman in her thirties and a curly haired boy, maybe seven or eight, whose hand she was holding. In the boy’s other hand were one or two sheets of paper, neatly folded in half with something printed in pencil Carolyn couldn’t make out. He lifted them up, extending his arm, his eyes asking Carolyn to take them as his mother began to speak.

“Are you ‘Carolyn’? the mother asked nervously.

“Yes,” Carolyn responded tentatively, turning her eyes downward to the boy smiling up at her. “What can I do…”

“I… You don’t know us. I live in Collier, about half an hour from here. My son, Jeff,” the mother started to explain, squeezing her son’s hand as she did, “is very bright. Good computer skills. This morning he was up early on his computer, typing. His hands are a little small, but he types real well anyway. Doesn’t have to look at the keys.” A sense of pride came through her anxiousness as she continued. “This here is what he gave my husband and me when he came in for breakfast. It’s typed, as you’ll see. That’s Jeff’s printing with your name and address there on the outside.”

Kneeling down in the open doorway, Carolyn extended her hand to take the pages from the little boy, his big brown eyes giving momentary relief from the sadness she had been fighting. “Hi, Jeff. Is that for me?”

“Yep,” he said, handing it over.

Unfolding it, she saw a page and a half of very neatly typed paragraphs. “Did you type this for me?”

“Yep,” he said again, nodding his head up and down this time. “I’m in the third grade.”

“How did you know my name and address? My husband and I,” Carolyn looked up at the mother to make this point,” haven’t even finished moving in yet.”

“Don’t know,” he smiled back at her, and her back at him. “It was just there.”

“Where’s that?”

“In my head, with the words I typed.”

“How ‘bout that.” Carolyn didn’t know whether or not to believe him, but, “What the heck,” she thought to herself, standing back up. “Well, thank you. Thank you both. I’ll read it while I’m finishing my bagel.” She didn’t know what else to say, forgetting even to ask how to contact them if she had any questions.

And the mother turned, walked down the stoop, her son in tow, when Jeff stopped, turned and said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what?” Carolyn asked him, still standing in the doorway.

“About your dad,” and then he turned and the two of them walked back to their car.

She was stunned. The almost surreal experience of these two strangers coming to the door, now replaced in her heart with the memory of being at the hospital the night before, realizing that her father had passed away just before she could get there.

Sitting down again, she read the note out loud to herself and Jack, who looked up at the expression on his wife’s face and listened quietly to the slight trembling in her usually steady voice.

Hi, Honey.

I don’t believe in God. You know that. We’ve talked about it from time to time. Just because there’s something, many things we don’t understand, doesn’t mean a deity had anything to do with them. It just means we haven’t figured them out yet. I believe in science. Still do, even now. And I most certainly don’t believe in ghosts. “Dead is dead,” I used to think to myself. Sad, but true. We are nothing more than complex biological machines, the imperfect product of eons of evolution, born to die.

These last few months, sitting on the deck, watching the birds and squirrels, I’ve been thinking about what makes us different from them. Many things, of course, but the one that struck me as most important is imagination. They know we exist, that we’re some kind of living thing, but they can’t imagine, can’t conceive of what we are.

And so it occurred me, albeit a self-serving realization in light of my current “predicament,” that perhaps we, too, suffer from the same shortcoming, overwhelmed as we are by the conceit and over-confidence that come naturally to any highly intelligent species.

Unlike my birds and furry friends on the deck and in the woods behind our house, we can pretty much imagine anything. It’s the stuff of science fiction, proof positive that we can conceive of things well beyond our ability to comprehend how they might be possible. Imagination is the leading edge of discovery. More and more, as our technology and knowledge advances, it becomes clear that imagining something is the precursor to figuring it out, to finding it, to making it happen. It’s not something the bird and the squirrel can do – although I wonder about the squirrels sometimes, the way they pause to figure out how to breach the “squirrel-proof” fence around the birdfeeder. They’re thinking, and there is great promise in that.

What if our recent success over the past few thousand years had made us arrogant? What if we’re not the most sophisticated, most intelligent life form on the planet? In the universe, of course we’ll concede that there must be other, superior life, but that’s a purely academic observation we lose nothing by making. Here, on earth, it’s all about us. We are the superior beings. Even more demeaning, what if we were only a stage in a process so surprising, so different from our experience, that it is, to us, a thousand times more profound than the difference between the bird and squirrel and me?

Is it possible – and the fact that I can imagine it may make it so – that exobiological intelligent life – intelligent life without discernable form, the ultimate wireless entity – exists here, and that all we are, physically, is a cocoon, larva, an interim step in the development of something else, the existence of which is nothing like human, the presence of which we cannot sense? How presumptuous of us to believe that life must have form, or that that form must be something we can see. There was, after all, a time not long ago, before microscopes, when we believed the only life there was was what we could see with the naked eye. Just because you can’t see or touch something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but only that, whatever it is, you can’t see or touch it.

I’ve always scoffed at stories about ghosts, about communicating with the dead, out of body near death experiences, and reincarnation, about whether or not there’s any substance to the notion of a “soul.” No doubt, they’re mostly bunk, the product of confused minds and charlatans who would profit from the need many of us feel for something more. On the other hand, maybe, just maybe there’s a simpler, explanation. Maybe it’s just that there’s another life form right here on Planet Earth, the distant relative we never knew we had to whom science will someday introduce us. What I propose, it’s just occurred to me, is nothing less than a unified theory, a single explanation for all the spiritual mumbo jumbo. “ Boo!” …Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. That used to scare you when I would read to you when you were a little kid. Scare you, and then you’d laugh – but don’t think from that poor excuse for comic relief that I’m not serious – or that the circumstances of your receiving these notes should be easily dismissed. (Sorry I missed you last night, but don’t feel bad. I know you came as soon as you heard.)

Could it be that death is not the end, period, but only a milestone? That the next stage needs time to develop the intellectual power and experience to be self-sustaining in its final form? Is it possible that we fight so hard to live, not because we believe there’s nothing more to it, nothing beyond our current existence, but as an instinctive mechanism to protect the life form we are nurturing? …a life form our science will one day be able to confirm and explain? What today is unbelievable, becomes tomorrow’s common knowlege in the science textbooks of high school and college.

Honey, I’m not talking God here. Heaven forbid. Nor am I waxing philosophical about souls or spirits. I’m just wondering if there might be a form of life, from us, but not like us, into which we might, each of us individually, be evolving.

Well, it’s all so much crap, isn’t it? After all, no one ever dies to tell about it. One thing’s for sure, if you’re reading this, the words, “I will always be here for you,” will now mean more than you would have otherwise imagined. As for the voice you’ll hear in your head every now and then, the one you think sounds like me, maybe it will be.

I love you.

Daddy

There was a moment of silence around the table, Carolyn staring at the word “Daddy” while Jack’s eyes moved around the table, his head fixed and face emotionless, settling on the open and now empty plastic tub from Trader Joe’s.

“We’re out of cream cheese.”

Not bothering to look up at him, she drew a shallow breath and set the neatly typed pages she was holding down to her right, on top of the folded style section she’d been reading before the doorbell rang. Her left elbow on the edge of the table, she massaged her forehead with the thumb and fingers of that hand. And then, pulling her lips apart slowly, closing them, and trying again, “Put it on the list,” she said instinctively, “…I’ll, uh,” forgetting for a moment what she was supposed to say, “I’ll be going shopping later today.”

-wf

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Copyright as of the title date or earlier, by me.
(I write the WordFeeder blog.)  All rights reserved.
Email WordFeeder@verizon.net for additional information.

Short fiction for guests of the WordFeeder.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Printable version… Dream a Little Dream of Me PDF

“Bobby?” As tiny as their apartment was, there were times when they couldn’t see each other. “Bobby, where are you?!” She shouted, struggling with one hand to dump their bedroom trashcan into the big garage bag she was holding in her other, and do it in the less than 18” they had between that one side of their bed and the wall with the window to the fire escape.

“Hi, Dorothy.” It was the shrill, instant headache, unforgivingly cheerful voice of her neighbor, the older lady that lived on her same floor but in the building that backed up against theirs.

“Hi, Mrs. Donnelly,” she answered reluctantly, pausing a second to look over rather than feeling bad the rest of the night for having ignored her. “How,” she thought to herself, “could someone that nice be so annoying?” “It’s cold out,” she said out loud this time, “shouldn’t you be closing your window?”

“You’ve got yours open” She was annoying, but not stupid.

“You’re right, Mrs. Donnelly. What was I thinking? ..Good night now,” and she reached up to pull the lower half of the window down, turning the lock and waving goodbye with a quick back and forth motion of her hand. “ … Bobby!”

“What?!” came the muffled, frustrated voice of her husband from behind the pocket door at the end of their kitchen, “I’m in the bathroom. Give me a break.”

“I’m taking the trash out.”

“Fine, fine, fine,” he responded with almost, but not quite complete disinterest, followed by the sounds of his turning the page and then refolding the front section of that morning’s Times he was just getting around to reading.

“Ummmh.” She was strong for being only five foot three, but the old metal door to their apartment, made heavier by more than a hundred years of sloppy paint, always took her best effort. Somehow the grunt seemed to help. “I’ll be right back,” she mumbled, not wanting to make herself heard over the banging shut of the door behind her. Instinctively, she patted the right front pocket of her jeans to make sure she had her key, the garbage bag she was carrying brushing up against the plaster wall of their narrow hallway.

Five flights down and around the marble steps of the converted tenement where they lived, past the building mail box, and she was almost at the door to the side alley. Outside there was a platform and two steps down to where the trash cans and, yes, an occasional rat would be waiting. But these were good, West Village rats, bohemian and more friendly than most in the city, so she liked to think, that fortunately she had never had the pleasure of meeting.

She took out the garbage every night after dinner, but tonight would be different. Tonight, coming around the corner past the mailboxes, in the dim light from the high ceiling above her, there on the small dirty white tiles just ahead of where she was walking, there was something dark on the floor. Letting the bag she was holding in her left hand down slowly, she bent over, not wanting to kneel down. Leaning forward, it was… it was.. “Blood?” she whispered calmly, at first, until the almost academic nature of her investigation was interrupted by the “chunk” of the door a few feet in front of her.

“Oh, my God!” she whispered nervously. “There must have been someone there,” she thought to herself. And then something else caught her attention. To her right, on the wall, she extended her own hand as if to touch the red print, smeared as if someone had pressed their hand against the wall on their way down to the floor. Turning her hand slowly to see her palm, a wave of fear unlike anything she had ever imagined finally hit her.

“BOBBEEE!!!!” Dorothy turned to run up the five flights back to her apartment. “BOBBEEEE!!” she kept shouting, running as fast as she could…

“What?! What’s wrong,” he rolled and sat up on his side of their bed. “What is it?” But then he knew, seeing her sitting up, staring at the palm of her right hand, her face contorted with fear, her chest heaving as it fought to catch the breath she didn’t really need to take. “Com’on,” he said, reaching around and pulling her toward him. “It’s just a dream, the same dream you keep having. …It’s not real. It’s not real, honey.”

It took what seemed to be forever, but she finally calmed down and fell back to sleep in his arms lying there, her head against his chest, his arm still around her.

——————————

“Mr. Cooper? …Mr. Cooper?”

“Yes, Doctor. Sorry, I…”

“It’s okay. You’ve been here with her for two days now. I’m sorry I had wake you, but I’m getting out of here for the night and didn’t want to leave without giving you an update.”

“So how’s she doing, Doctor?” Bobby asked, getting up from the chair by the window where he had finally fallen asleep, exhausted to the point of shaking when he talked. “Why isn’t she conscious yet? Shouldn’t she…”

“Hold on. I think she’s going to be okay. Actually, physically, she appears to be recovering well from the surgery.”

“Then why isn’t she…”

“Bobby, listen to me,” he responded, doing his best to calm Bobby down. “Think about it… She goes down to take out the trash, like she does every night, but this time she interrupts some spaced out druggy who’d apparently come in, the Police aren’t sure why, panics and shoots her. That kind of trauma does things to your head. If one of your neighbors hadn’t stopped by for his mail, she could have died, could have bled to death, but she didn’t. She’s going to be okay. This tossing you see, this squinting and anxiety you see in her face… She’s fighting on one hand to wake up, but on the other to stay under, to make it a dream, to fight the reality of what’s happened to her.”

“When do you…”

“I don’t know, Bobby. You sit by the bed like you’ve been doing. Hold her hand. Talk to her. Most of all, let her hear your voice. …You’ll both be okay.”

-wf

*From the lyrics by Gus Kahn.

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Copyright as of the title date or earlier, by me.
(I write the WordFeeder blog.)  All rights reserved.
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Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Printable version… Finding Dana PDF

October 4, 1966.

“Jeff?”

For a moment, sitting there in the twilight of their bedroom, he thought he heard someone calling his name from whatever was playing on the TV that Dana insisted had to be on all night. He turned to look, wondering for the moment at how surreal the flat screen seemed on the wall behind him, like a painting come to life, not at all what he expected. Slowly, he turned back to stare at her face, barely illuminated by the soft light coming from their lamppost through the blinds. It was the middle of the night, 3:48 AM to be precise, according to the glowing numbers on the radio across the bed, on the nightstand next to the side where he’d been sleeping.

He was up, but tired. He never did need much sleep, but lately, now in his early sixties, getting up in the middle of the night had become routine. Sometimes, he’d go downstairs to do the dishes leftover from a late dinner the night before, or write pieces that no one would ever read. Writing was the passion that practical choices and the circumstances of life had denied him, but not so that it made any difference. Finding Dana made whatever he hadn’t accomplished seem unimportant.

He would stay down until he was tired, so his restlessness wouldn’t disturb her, and then go back to lay beside her, tucking his hand under her side to help him fall asleep.

Tonight he sat on the edge of her side of the bed watching her face – ever so slightly older, but then even more beautiful than the evening he’d first seen it. What he saw was as new as it was familiar. If anything could be both at the same time, it was Dana. She was the girl, now woman he’d love to meet, and yet somehow had always known. Forty years together and still he couldn’t take his eyes off her, but instead of love which was obvious, what he felt was sadness and fear. The night seemed like such a waste of time, given how relatively little they had left. What, maybe 20 years if they were lucky, if he could live that long? A long time when you’re twenty, when there’s more after that, but no time at all when there isn’t.

It was a ridiculous…

“Hey, Jeff?” He heard it again, now with the sound of other voices and music in the background.

Whatever it was, he’d ignore it.

…a ridiculous question, the kind only an over-active mind would consider. On one hand, he wanted to go first, to never have to live without her. On the other… On the other, he loved her too much not to be there for her until the end.

“Hey, buddy,” his friend, Howie, was standing next to the booth Jeff had been holding for them, seeming unusually short, an anxious waiter holding a tray over her head while his friends blocked the narrow aisle. Pushing on Jeff’s shoulder, he tried again, “Jeffrey, honey? I really need you to…”

“Yeh. Hi. Hi. ..Sorry, I was just… Actually, I’m not sure what I was thinking about.” Looking up, his eyes blew past his chubby friend, past “Bunny,” the girl he’d been dating, to her friend with the green eyes, short blond hair and instantly familiar smile.

He stood up carefully, worried he’d forget that the booths were one step up. He’d made a mental note not to make a fool of himself when he first got there and asked the girl at the door if he could hold the table for his friends. “The Pub,” which was all the simple sign over the door said, was one of those places every college town has, right off campus, where bad cheeseburgers on Kaiser rolls and fat steak fries couldn’t have tasted better.

“Hi,” he smiled back at her, extending his hand. It was too proper, close to weird, he knew that, but he had to be sure. “I’m Jeff,” he told her, as if she didn’t already know.

“Jeff,” Howie decided he needed to make a formal introduction. “This is Dana. Dana, this is Jeff.” For some reason it made her giggle.

He was still holding her hand, but finally let go on the way to inviting her to sit next to him on his side of the booth. Howie and Bunny squeezed in across from them. The table, he thought, was too wide, too far across for them to talk.

Turning to his left to face her, while Howie passed out their badly typed menus in plastic folders, he said it again. “Hi.”

“You already said that,” she answered, leaving him to wonder if she punctuated every sentence with that same smile.

“Yeh, uhhh… We need to go out.”

“We are out.”

“I mean on a date?”

“This isn’t a date?”

“I meant, without Howie, Bunny, or any other animals.”

“Don’t you want to see how tonight goes?” she asked, knowing already how it was going to turn out.

“No, no. I mean, I already know we’re going out again.”

“You do?”

“ I just wanted to get the award moment after I walk you back to the dorm out of the way now… so I can spend more time kissing you goodnight.”

Suddenly, Howie and “The Rabbit” as he sometimes referred to her in private, stopped over-talking each other and were staring across the table, their eyes moving from one of their friends to the other.

Pausing for a moment, Dana leaned forward, planting a gentle, perfectly long-lasting kiss on his lips, a little bubble popping as she broke away. It felt like a week before he opened his eyes, but she waited before saying anything. “There. Now that that’s out of the way, maybe you can buy me something to eat.”

-wf

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Short Fiction for Guests of the WordFeeder
Thursday, August 7, 2008                                   
Printable version… Self-Fulfilling Prophecy PDF

Had there been anyone there to tell the story, it would have seemed to take forever for the glass to tumble from the edge of the desk to the floor which was no longer where it used to be, losing its few leftover drops of last night’s wine along the way to oblivion.

The sound began like rolling thunder, slightly off key, building, not gradually enough, to a deafening crescendo no one would be there to hear, a perverse celebration of something someone had anticipated long ago, perhaps no more than a lucky guess, or maybe a quirk of time and space Einstein’s disciples would one day figure out.  It was the birthday of a legend – fodder for endless speculation and mind-numbing over-coverage by the network and cable news.

Twenty minutes earlier…

It was a postcard morning, as it had been every day since they arrived in Nassau to celebrate their fifth anniversary.  The view out their eighth floor ocean suite might as well have been painted on the glass.  The door to the balcony had been open all night, the breezes that were everywhere on Paradise Island pulling the sheer curtain outward, like the flowing white dress of some unseen spirit that had come to watch over them.  Below, on the beach by the cove for which the hotel was named, the morning sun reflected off the water coloring the white under-feathers of the sea birds an iridescent turquoise that seemed unreal.

Well-rested, they were up early, anxious to get their cabana chairs in the perfect position for a long day of reading, writing, talking about everything and nothing in particular.  Now and then, when it was too hot, they cool themselves with walks in the warm ocean water, and virgin banana daiquiris artfully prepared by one of the always friendly locals at the nearest beach bar.  Their first five years had blown by.  This week at the Atlantis complex was just the long overdue break they needed.

Atlantis was on Paradise Island, separated by only Nassau harbor from New Providence Island in the Bahamas, a billion dollar resort with hotels, beaches, elaborate pools and water activities, all built around the theme of its namesake, the legend of Atlantis, complete with Hollywood’s best quality ruins of the great city that once disappeared beneath the sea.  Andy and Carolyn were staying in the more exclusive, more adult, less Disney section of the resort – the hotel with the two story lobby with no walls, the Mesa Grill, and cushioned islands in the middle of the pool to which waiters waded out to bring you drinks made from rum and fresh fruit.  They planned to eat at the Grill tonight, either that or go out for conch fritters and shrimp at “Bad News Jack” in the city.  They figured they were young, and their colons could take it.

“Honey,” Carolyn was too busy packing her beach bag to see what it was all about, “you’re getting an e-mail from Amanda,” his younger sister.

“I was wondering why we hadn’t heard from her.”  Missing a birthday or anniversary wasn’t like Amanda.  She was a professor of ancient history at Columbia, and had taken the summer off to do research in Athens on the history of some of the ancient writers.  Andy sat down, double clicked, and began reading to himself.

“What’s she have to say?” Carolyn shouted past the open double doors to the bathroom, squeezing herself into the bathing suit she had optimistically purchased one size too small just for their vacation.

“I don’t know.  She seems anxious.  Doesn’t even mention our anniv…   Wait a minute.  What’s she talking about?”  He was quite for moment while he read the next few paragraphs.  “Apparently, she was doing research on this one writer, who was writing about another writer who he – the first one – claimed had originated the ancient legend of Atlantis.”

“That’s nice,” Carolyn was standing behind him now, her hands on his shoulders, his arms folded in front of their laptop along the edge of the desk near their bed.  “Let’s get out of here.  I know exactly where I want to sit.”  There was this one lone palm tree right at the beach, maybe 20 feet from the where the water and dry sand broke even.  Sitting under it was like having your own, personal oasis.

“Hold on for second.  She says the originator wasn’t claiming to be writing about something that had happened, but was making a prediction, a prophesy about something that would happen hundreds of years in the future.  The guy was some kind of scientist, pretty advanced for his time and actually offered what she thinks might be some crude mathematical calculation as to when it would occur.  She’s asked a friend of hers – some Greek geologist she’s been dating…”

“Give me a break.”

“…to help with the translation.  She wants us to…”

“Hey, com’on,” she told him, leaning forward to kiss him on the back of his neck, just below his right ear, causing the usual instinctive crunch of his neck toward his shoulder.  “You can finish reading and get back to her later.”

“I don’t know, she seems worked up.  I mean, look at this writing, not even taking the time to proof what she’s written.  It’s not her…”

Carolyn moved her hands from his shoulders to around his neck, faking strangulation.

Andy didn’t need convincing.  “Yeh, yeh,” he started to say as he rose up from his seat.  “Head for the door.  I’ll get my hat.”

Turning to her right to look out and over the balcony.  “If you ask me, every room should have its own waterslide directly to the beach.”

Carolyn left for the door, pressing the button to ask housekeeping to make up their room while they were out.  Andy, right behind her, just barely slipped into the hallway before the door chunked shut behind him, and they were off, fake racing each other on their way to the elevators.

Minutes later, in their room, the sound of the ocean wafting through the open glass doors was interrupted by the “boop, boop” of the breaking news ticker across the bottom of the notebook’s screen.  “USGS scientists are reporting widespread, significant seismic activity in the British West Indies,” the message began.  A wine glass next to the computer, still showing the last few ruby drops left over from the night before, began to vibrate, the bottom of the stem taping, first slowly, and now more rapidly, as it drifted slowly across the glass surface of their desk, and the screen on their laptop went blank.

-wf

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Copyright as of the title date or earlier, by me.
(I write the WordFeeder blog.)  All rights reserved.
Email WordFeeder@verizon.net for additional information.