Earth
Section IV
Stones
They must have been made from something softer, like sandstone. It was this whole section way in the back part of the cemetery. I came over the top of the hill, and there they were: blank, dingy brown stones all at crooked angles. Nature didn’t just take their bodies. It took away their names too. Without names they’re just stones, the least alive things on the planet. It terrified me. I started running as fast as I could down the hill. But gravity got ahead of me. I tripped, started tumbling, hit my head on something hard. Then nothing.
After forty minutes I came to with this awful headache and started remembering what happened. I was covered in mud and leaves, sticks coming out of my hair, and this scratch on my face—not deep—but my face was covered in dried blood. I must have looked like the living dead. I think I was moaning, because when I stood, two women were standing a few yards away, gaping at me. I had been on the other side of a big monument, but as soon as they saw me, they screamed bloody murder, dove into their car, and drove away.
Petrichor
The storm had passed. Wind had blown the buds right off of the trees, while rain had summoned up worms from the earth. They gathered with the cigarette butts on the curb in a great pulpy mass. Gusts of wind still shook large drops of water from the trees. They fell with a soft, irregular patter onto the world below.
Droplets still hung to the glass. Grey half-light trickled through.
“You lied to me.”
The clock was ticking thunderously.
“I know.” Nervous hands tug on clothing and crack knuckles. “I’m sorry.”
The world was breathing softly. People and animals alike cast wary glances toward a still foreboding sky.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t.”
“You . . .”
Hands clenched. So did jaws. Muscles shuddered under the weight of unspoken words. Fingernails are digging into skin—white knuckles, red nails. Shaking fingers unfold into a gesture of supplication.
A bluebird alighted on a slender branch. A shower of drops fell into the grass. It chirped once, twice. It began a simple melody.
Eyes met.
“I love you.”
The clouds opened up. It was the first real sunshine in days. The bird departed.
“I love you too.”
Deep roots soaked up the rain.
Pear
Dear Isabella,
I hear my buddy Chris decided to pay you a visit. After the laugh we had with him, I’m surprised he was even brave enough to show his face in public. But the really astonishing part is that I heard you’re actually going along with his crazy idea. Is this for real? I mean, did he show you that lame bit with the pear? I told everybody you must be playing a practical joke on him or something. He’s calling himself the “Great Admiral of the Ocean” for crying out loud. How could anyone take a guy like that seriously? But everyone tells me you’re sincere. Do you actually think he’ll make it?
If all I’ve heard is true, then I have to let you know I’m a little concerned. I mean, what are you and Ferdinand smoking over there? First it was the Inquisition, then the Granada War, now this. I think you guys need to rethink some life choices. Everyone knows Chris is a crackpot who wants to kill all the Indians ever. And besides, Africa is where the real action is. Cape of Good Hope, here we come!
Yours,
King John II of Portugal
1492
First
It was the most watched event since the invention of television, bigger than any sporting event or its counterpart in 1969.
“We walk here today carried not just by human legs, but by the dreams of the human race.” The words had been written months ago. Not quite Armstrong, but not half bad either. For Estoban Buendías, it was a dream come true. He had beheld grandeur never before seen by human eye, not even by the robots that had roamed the surface. His crew had ascended mountains higher than Everest. Today they would descend a gorge five times deeper the Grand Canyon. As day broke on Mars, these grand thoughts were preeminent in Estoban’s mind, when he heard a knocking.
“Paul? Was that you?”
“Not me.”
“Heidi?”
“Nope.”
“There wasn’t supposed to be a meteor shower today, was there?” Then he heard it again, but more distinctly: tap tatta tap tap. Pause. Tap tap. In terror and confusion, Estoban hastily donned a space suit and threw open the airlock. Standing before him was a tiny, old woman in a lace-trimmed spacesuit.
“Welcome to the neighborhood!” she chirped, thrusting a Tupperware container into his hands. “Hope you kids like fruitcake.”
Answers
They say don’t ask questions you can’t handle the answers to.
Norman Jeffries, chief official on the operation, walked briskly through the corridors of the sprawling facility. He left R&D where they were trying to reverse engineer the technology, and headed toward linguistics.
The object had smashed into a Waffle House in Caryville, Tennessee. Lots of pictures made it to the internet before the government was able to seize control of the site, obligating them to reveal the significance of the find. It was, in fact, an unmanned alien spacecraft, still mostly intact. UFO enthusiasts celebrated the finding, though it would still take time before the full nature of the findings were disclosed.
Jeffries entered the linguistics department. Among the items salvaged had been a kind of illustrated encyclopedia, a Rosetta stone for the alien language. The lead analyst was working with images of crop circles and prehistoric geoglyphs. Jeffries looked over her shoulder and gasped. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
Beside the alien symbols, she had written out rough translations.
Xoirq was here
Zayrn Kthilin eats poop
Butts
A long string of alien profanities.
“Yes, sir. It seems earth is the bathroom stall of the galaxy.”
Visitors
For almost a decade, “The End of the World as We Know It” was the number one request on WCTZ’s all night oldies. That’s how long we knew they were coming. Everyone expected the cynicism to die out sooner or later; instead, the closer they got, the more fatalism came into vogue. After the first instrument picked up the anomaly, every satellite and telescope in orbit focused their attention on the same spot. Hubble was the first to get a picture, a faint, blurry speck in the Eagle Nebula. Almost immediately, a coalition of American, Russian, Indian, and Japanese scientists formed in the hopes of advancing technology so we might learn more about these approaching strangers. So we might be prepared, if possible.
Strange lights and strange shadows filled the sky, provoking desperate prayers when the vessel finally arrived. The landing craft did not head for a major city as everyone had supposed, but directly to a large plantation in Brazil. News crews and diplomats scrambled to get there in time, but only one old woman was present for first contact when the gangly yellowish creature stepped down and said, “Hiya, neighbor! Mind if we borrow a cup of sugar?”
Awakening
It was impossible to know how long the world had slept. When that first day dawned, he was aware that he and the world were waking together. It was quiet. There was a cold white powder everywhere he looked.
It was not long before he realized he had awoken to a world of chaos and danger. The ground often shook beneath him so violently that he was sure he would be flung off the earth and into the unknown, beyond atmosphere and imagination. If it was not the earthquakes, it was the weather. The white powder that had been his first sensation seemed to fall constantly from the sky, swirling in a perpetual white haze. Cold battered him. It was all he could do to survive. Nights, at least, seemed peaceful; though sometimes strange lights burned far off, and these seemed portents of nature’s fury. After suffering long through this torment, he concluded
that cruel, merciless gods ruled his universe.
One day, without warning, the world went dark. All was once more quiet and still. It would remain so for long ages . . . until next Christmas when the decorations were dragged out and the snow globe was set on the mantle.
Blind
Frank was the sort of man who drank cheap beer and talked at the urinal. From the next cubicle over, I could always smell the tuna he had for lunch and hear him laughing too loudly while reading celebrity gossip on his work computer.
When he died suddenly, a few of us from the office went to the viewing. A beautiful woman with eyes red from crying stood beside the casket. I didn’t even know he was married. Afterwards, at the bar, one of the guys joked, “Love really must be kind and patient and blind too for a woman like her to cry over a man like that.” We all laughed. It wasn’t that Frank was so despicable, but there simply didn’t seem to be anything to admire.
But driving home that night, I couldn’t keep the tears from my eyes. Maybe it was too much whiskey. Maybe it was because I had seen true love. And maybe the love did not blind Frank’s wife, but helped her see past the ordinary or obnoxious to someone who could always protect, trust, hope, persevere—someone worth weeping for.
Maybe I had been blind.
Crying, I drove through the night alone.
Pudding
The sky was dark that Tuesday, and his options were rice pudding or sugar free Jell-O. After three weeks, he still wasn’t used to the desserts. I don’t have diabetes, he thought. Why can’t I have the real stuff?
“Hey Karl, want us to deal you in for a game of Rummy?” one of the strangers across the room asked.
“Sure,” he answered, still facing the dessert table. “Why not?” He sighed. At least it’s not bridge again. From outside, low thunder groaned in agreement.
Then it started raining.
Now that’s an idea . . . Karl shuffled across the community hall, carefully stepping out of his slippers at the door. It took longer than he expected for the attendants to notice, but soon enough a woman in one of those grey dresses was tugging his arm and saying, “Mr Sheffield, come back inside or you’ll catch your death. What are you thinking?”
Karl smiled with childish delight. “You don’t belong somewhere till you’ve got its mud between your toes.”
Dripping water on the playing cards, Karl sat down to the game table. Still chuckling to himself, he set aside his dentures, smacked his lips, and ate an enormous spoonful of rice pudding.
Funeral
His funeral was the first time I had seen my sisters together in eight years. Mom had asked me to say a few words, and I agreed without really even thinking. I still didn’t know what to call him.
Misty, my older sister, had always called him Roger, which always made mom look sad. But when Julie, the baby of the family, started calling him Daddy, it made mom cry. Of course, that always made Misty angry. I remember spending most of my childhood confused and generally tried to avoid calling him anything. Sometimes I wondered if all the arguments that came later hadn’t started with that simple difference.
When the time came, Misty spoke first, which surprised me. She had a whole speech written out, but started crying when she was only a few words in and couldn’t finish. Then Julie got up. She talked quietly, but had all the right words. When she sat down, Mom nudged me.
I stood at the front of the church looking at my sisters sitting together, Mom with tears in her eyes, even Dad was there. “I’m afraid of love,” I said. “So, I avoid it. Then I’m safe.”
I sat down.
Scrape
Scrape . . .
They would never think to look here, he thought. And he was right. None of them would ever stumble across the hiding place. In fact, no one would lay eyes on the box for the next century and a half until it would be discovered by some kids who had never heard of Flint McGee.
Scrape . . .
The sound of metal against stones clawed at his ears. It was annoyances like that which drove him to these extremes. Some of them could be put up with. Some, like this sound, had to be put up with. But others needed to be taken care of.
Scrape . . .
Just a little farther . . . it will be perfect. He was right. It would be ten feet by ten feet by ten feet. Overkill, certainly. But some efforts are necessary, he thought. Some things must be hidden.
Scrape . . .
It was that sound again. He was glad that it would stop soon. Just like the other: that incessant whine he had silenced. But this one would stop more simply and gently than the last.
Scrape . . .
Finished. It was perfect. He climbed the ladder, pulling it up behind him and said his last farewell to Flint McGee.
Scrape . . .
Fatherhood
Frank drives to the next town over, stops in the drug store, and buys a father’s day card. With a crayon in his left hand, he scrawls “I love you, Daddy” in the card and his own name and address on the envelope and drops it in a mailbox. He shows the card to everyone at the diner. Frank is the proudest father you will ever meet.
Frank has an expensive photo quality printer. In his free time at work, Frank scans through page after page of stock photo websites for pictures of teenagers that look like the pictures of children in his wallet. He updates the photos every year.
Frank stays up all late writing out scripts for various phone conversations, recites them in front of a mirror, and memorizes one half to be performed at just the right moment. At the table by the window, in the break room, at the bus stop, he looks down at his phone pleasantly surprised when an alarm goes off.
Frank has a heart attack at 46. He doesn’t make it. After several days, a young man named Frank Jr. whom no one has ever seen before, arrives to claim the body.
Riddle
It looked like her father was merely sleeping beneath a blanket of grass. They had buried him at the top of the hill, beneath the old dogwood tree, and for forty-three days following the funeral, Penelope didn’t speak.
Her mother, shaken by grief, was at a loss, as were her teachers. Though despite Penelope’s silence, she continued doing well in her classes, except choir. Her brothers tried to get her to talk, either by asking her questions or by poking her ribs, but Penelope never made a peep.
After forty-three days, Penelope visited the grave again. Her mother, who had been there every day, laid a forty-third carnation on the headstone and wept softly. Penelope stared hard at the stone like it was a riddle, then whispered the word: “Why?”
“Penelope?” her mother asked. “Did you say something?”
“Why?” she said louder.
“I don’t know, Penelope. I wish I did.”
But Penelope was looking neither at her mother, nor at the grave, but at the sky. Taking a deep breath, she shouted that one word—”Why?”—until she started to disappear. When she was nearly invisible, a strong gust of wind lifted her up and carried her into the sky.
Pendulum
They say a frictionless pendulum will swing forever: back and forth and back and forth and always at the same rate. Of course, there’s no such thing as a frictionless pendulum in real life. There’s always something slowing them down, so as they swing back and forth, the arc gets shorter, but it goes back and forth at a slower rate too, so it takes the same amount of time for each swing until it eventually stops. Or maybe it never stops. I don’t know. Maybe the arc of the swing gets so short that you can’t see it anymore.
This is kind of a pendulum—yes, a pendulum. I’ve been watching it for over an hour. How long it will swing? It’s mesmerizing—hypnotizing even, in a strange sort of way. I like to think that pendulums will swing forever, just in smaller and smaller arcs.
It’s starting to rain now. I should probably go inside, but where? I have no real home anywhere now. I will stay here, hypnotized by the slow swaying, an
d I will die here in the rain at my father’s feet as his body swings back and forth . . .
Back and forth . . .
Back . . .
And forth . . .
Pine
Jack breathed in deeply the scent of pinewood as sawdust filled the air. This wasn’t the work I set out to do, he thought. He had learned carpentry to make beautiful houses and fill them with exquisite furniture. Unfortunately, in his small, impoverished village, dismal utilitarian tasks like this constituted the majority of his work, though even this was not as large as most. He checked the measurements again. 3’6”—so small.
He thought of the man who had commissioned this project—his desperate request and earnest thanks. That man deserved Jack’s finest work, as much care as he would give a grand staircase, even for a project as simple as this one.
He worked with renewed vigor. But just as he was about to pound the first nail, several loud, excited voices outside startled him from his concentration. Somewhat irritated, he thrust his head out the door to see what the ruckus was.
“Jack, did’ja hear about that Thompson girl. Doc Conners says her fever broke”
With a smile and a sigh, Jack cleaned up, putting away tools, sweeping the floor, and setting the boards aside. Perhaps they’ll get to become part of a bookshelf instead of a coffin.
Beating
The bell rang like a scream in the night. “Help!” he shouted. “It’s the bell. Someone help!” Then he remembered the shovel and began digging frantically. Everyone had told him there was nothing to worry about; no one could remember the last time a bell rang. The graveyard shift was merely a sign of fidelity, a duty to the dead. But here he was in the dark, and the bell with its chord running down into the grave was ringing, which meant his uncle had been buried alive.
By the time his shovel struck wood, several other townspeople, awoken by his shouts, had gathered around the hole and were hacking at the earth with spades and shovels of their own. As they uncovered the pinewood box, they could hear a frantic beating and rustling beneath the boards of the coffin.
“Lift the lid off,” someone shouted. “He needs air.” The blacksmith had arrived with a crowbar and set to work prying up nails. When enough were finally removed, they tore the lid from the coffin. And the night was filled suddenly with a din of beating wings, as one hundred doves flew out of the coffin and toward the moon.
Metro
It’s his first time in Paris after six years away. Lights outside the metro car flash and fall away like the memories that sprang from everything he saw. With a screech of weary brakes, the train pulls into Luxembourg, the station where they had said goodbye.
She refused to let him go.
“Kiss me goodbye.”
“I already did.”
“I know, but kiss me again.”
One train went by, then a second, and then a third. When the fourth came, he told her, “This time I really have to go,” but she held on to his jacket and buried her head in his chest.
“Not yet, not yet.” The doors closed and another train went by. The fifth finally carried him to the airport. Coming out of the metro that day had felt like being born.
His train leaves the Luxembourg station and dives again into the tunnel. It is as dark as he imagines death must be. Suddenly, another train appears beside his, rushing in the opposite direction. He wonders if she might be on that train, and if they are passing each other as they always had, side by side for a moment, then lost into their separate darknesses.