Moonshot – Part 2

The next week took a year to go by. Mom decided it was time to repaint the porch and set me down with a scraper to take off the old layers down to bare wood. It was fun at first, popping the blisters and seeing how big a paint chip I could take intact, but after the first half hour, it was real work again. After an hour, I had one board scraped with thirty seven to go.

“We can’t go see the rocket launch until we get this done,” Mom said, and silenced my coming protest just by tilting her head. She left me on the porch to do whatever it was Mom did in the house when she wasn’t finding chores for me to do.

I spent the time thinking about the snake in my old classroom. After our unit on insects, we moved on to reptiles. The teacher brought in a garter snake, and set in an aquarium in the window. The crickets, having no further scientific purpose, became food. I wondered if the snake’s belly hurt from the spines on their legs, but it didn’t seem to notice. I figured it was a smart snake, because after we finished learning all about reptiles, it escaped and couldn’t be found. Our next unit was on amphibians, which didn’t eat snakes, but the snake didn’t know that. I understand there is still a story floating around the school that it has since grown to the size of an anaconda and lives in the girl’s bathroom.

A cracking voice said, “Did you get it?”

I must have jumped ten feet, but I didn’t look around. The thin green man had never come to the house before.

“Ted?” my mom called.

“Nothing, Mom!”

“That yelling didn’t sound like nothing to me.”

“Spider crawled over my hand.”

“You okay now?

“Yeah, smushed it,” I called back. I glanced a few inches to the side, where I saw a pointed toe sticking out from around the corner. “Shh! You’re gonna get me in trouble.”

“Sorry,” it said.

“I got it. I used my comic money and bought it when Mom and Dad weren’t looking.” I gave the board an extra hard scrape and left a gouge.

“Excellent. I am ready to go.”

“Well I’m gonna be stuck here all summer. Mom’s not going to let me go until this porch is done.”

“She doesn’t mean that.”

“You don’t know her. This one time, she made me sit at the dinner table for a whole hour until I ate all my salad.”

I think it laughed. “Well, we can’t have that. Close your eyes.”

I listened as it stepped onto the porch and tapped at the boards until they made a note. Tap–tap-tong, tap-tap-tong, like a xylophone. When it finished at the far end, a breeze cooled my sweaty neck, and its voice came from around the corner.

“Take a look.”

The paint on each board’s end had curled. I reached out and pulled a strip of paint away from the porch like a banana peel. The wood beneath was clean and clear.

“Keen,” I said.

“You should be done in an hour.” It said, and was gone.

When I showed Mom, she couldn’t speak for a long, long time. She just looked from the bare porch to the pile of paint chips.

“Well, I guess it needed painting more than I thought,” she finally said. “Let’s go get the brushes.”

*

Driving eighteen hours in a car was bad enough without a green man in your pocket. It didn’t weigh much more than a piece of gum, and didn’t take up any space, but I knew it was there. It moved and poked my leg by accident some times and others on purpose if I started squishing it as I crawled around the backseat. Eventually, I found a way to sit that was half-way comfortable.

We camped at a beach within sight of the launch pad. They had these huge lights on the rocket, so you could see it in the dark. When Mom and Dad went for a walk, the green man slipped out of my pocket and found a deep shadow to hide in.

“I recognize this place,” it said.

“It’s Cape Kennedy. It was in that magazine I gave you.”

“No, before it was called that, I watched some of your explorers come by and discover it and name it something else.”

“What’d they call it?”

“I don’t remember,” it said. “Something long and beautiful. Then many years later, more explorers in iron helmets came and re-discovered it.”

“Did they name it Canaveral?” I asked. “That’s what Dad calls it. He says it’s only been Kennedy for a few years.”

“Something like that, but in a different language. Cañaveral. I wasn’t around when they settled on this name.”



I thought for a moment. “So if you were here first, what did you name it?”

It sighed. “I could not name this place; I wasn’t the first of my people here. I arrived much later.”

“There are more like you?”

It shifted in the darkness. “Far away in other places. Places like the hills behind your home, or deep underground, or on the bottom of the ocean, exploring, discovering new things and naming them.”

“Do you want to name something?”

“Very much, but everything here has been discovered. The unexplored places are very difficult to reach for someone as young as myself.”

“Oh. Like how Dad had to drive us here in the car? I don’t know how to drive and I’m not old enough anyway.”

“Yes, very much like that. I’m not old enough to drive.”

*

The next day, we drove as close to the launch pad as we could. Dad finally gave up fighting the traffic and declared we were as close as we were ever going to get. We trudged out and stood next to others set up on the beach with telescopes, binoculars, lawn chairs, and a radio tuned to the countdown. A gang of kids ran in and out of the waves. The boy in front held up a beach ball, and the others chased him waving sticks, model rockets, and Buck Rogers ray guns.

“Why don’t you go over and see if you can play too,” my mom said.

It looked like fun. One kid even had a helmet that said NASA on it. I bet if I played long enough, he’d let me have a turn with it. Or maybe the other kid with the ray gun would share. Mom didn’t let me have ray guns, and wasn’t happy with Grandma when she got me a Sunset Carson six-shooter cap gun either. This looked like the only time in my life I would get a chance to hold an actual ray gun. Then one of the boys fell head-first into the sand. He spluttered and shook his head like a dog before pushing himself up and running after the gang, his front all crusted with sand and salt water. My stomach flipped as I remembered what I had in my pockets, and so I shook my head.

“No, I’m gonna stay here,” I said.

“Well, okay, but no complaining.”

Mom and Dad talked with the other grown-ups about boring stuff while I watched the rocket and listened to mission control count backwards. A man walked down the beach with a cart and umbrella decorated with orange, red, and purple soda pops.

“Can I have an orange Nehi?” I asked.

“No,” Dad said, but that didn’t mean anything so I looked at Mom.

“Curtis, it is hot out here. I wouldn’t mind something to drink myself.”

“Hm?” Dad said, and turned away from the other dad he was talking to. “Oh sure. What do you want?”

“Just a cola. Orange for Ted.”

“Okay, be right back.”

As Dad went to get the drinks, Mom smiled at me. Then the other dad offered her a cigarette and she turned away. The dad tried lighting the cigarette for her, but his lighter wasn’t working. He seemed embarrassed, but Mom just waved a hand at him.

“Teddy, can you get Mom’s lighter, please?” she asked.

I never knew a purse could hold so much. There was a kind of long wallet, lipstick, tissues, a pen, a mirror, a magazine, a pack of gum, and tiny paper wads. I pushed it to the side and found her cigarette case at the bottom of it all, with a shiny lighter in a side pouch.

“Thank you, Teddy,” she said, taking the lighter and letting the other dad light her cigarette. Her mouth made a soft popping sound as she finished her first puff. I thought she looked just like a movie star.

“Could you put this back?” She said, and went back to talking with the other grown-ups. I put the lighter in my other pocket, not knowing if the green man would pinch me for making him share space.

Dad came back with the clanking, sweaty bottles and handed me my orange Nehi. I guzzled half of it right away, letting the tangy sweet drink run past my tongue. It was good enough to make me almost forget about all the fun the other kids were having. As the last of the bubbles fizzed from my tongue, I let out a grown-up-sized burp.

“Ted!” Dad said.

“Excuse me,” I said. Dad shook his head and put his arm around Mom’s waist as he told the other grown-ups all about what he did all day at home. I got up and walked to the ocean.

“Do you have everything?” the green man asked from my pocket.

“Yes.” I took another gulp of Nehi.

“Are there any places to hide?”

“No.”

“Then can you build me a shadow place in the sand? So that I can see the rocket without being seen?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I can build a sandcastle.”

“That would be acceptable.”

I bent down and started mounding up wet sand while the grownups talked, the other kids chased each other around, and the astronauts sat in their rocket. The green man talked about explorers who traveled over the oceans, mountains, grasslands and deserts. How they would travel for months or years before returning home. Sometimes, they wouldn’t return at all.

“Do your mom and dad miss you?” I asked

“I do not know.”

“Do you miss them?”

“No. But it is different for me. You might say I was built to be an explorer, and do not mind staying away for a long time,” it said.

“What am I built for?”

“Today, you are built to watch a rocket go to the moon. Tomorrow, who knows?”



“Well, your sandcastle is done.”

“A fine castle in every respect,” it said.

It was really just three lumps of wet sand mounded on each other with the Nehi bottle as a turret. The shadowed side was scooped out at the bottom to make the launch pad visible. I stood behind the castle on the other side as the green man left my pocket.

“The rocket has three parts,” I said. “The top part is where the astronauts sit, the other two parts fall off when they’re out of gas.”

“Thank you, I remember,” it said.

A cheer went up from the crowd and people darted around, picking up their cameras and binoculars. Dad shouted my name. He waved his hands and pointed at the launch pad. I waved and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Get ready,” the green man said.

Plumes of smoke and fire poured out of the rocket seconds before the terrible rumble hit me. It was like a thunderstorm under my feet. I pulled the lighter from my pocket along with the bottle rocket I had bought at the grocery store last time instead of a comic book.

“Now!” it said.

I stuck the firework in the bottle and fumbled at the lighter. A second sun seemed to grow from the launch pad, leaving the green man with only the tiniest of shadows. The roar filled my ears, my chest, my eyeballs. I lit the fuse and a green flash jumped on top of the bottle.

The rocket leapt from the bottle, and even though I wasn’t supposed to look, I did. The green man seemed no bigger than a toy car, with knees and arms wrapped around the rocket like a cowboy on a wild Mustang. I waited for the rocket to pop like they did on Fourth of July, but it kept going, shrinking to a little black dot, and then it was gone.

The other rocket was almost gone too, just a ball of fire on a coil of smoke. As the ringing in my ears faded, I heard people cheering, clapping, and whistling. A hand fell on my shoulder, and I looked up into my dad’s face.

“What did you think?” he asked.

“Can we see another one?”

He laughed. “Not for a while, you’ll just have to make these memories last.”

“Oh.”

“But don’t worry, I’m sure that by the time you’re my age, there will be a spaceport in every city in the country. Heck, you may even live on the moon!”

I don’t know if the green man made it to the moon. I used a magnifying glass on all the pictures the astronauts took, I stared at the moon with the telescope I got for Christmas, but I didn’t really expect to see anything. The trips home from the grocery store seemed longer without it following from the edge of the trees and fog, there to tickle at the corner of my eye. We stopped going to the moon three years later, and I stopped looking for the green man not too long after that.

And yet –

And yet, in today’s newspaper, a picture from the Chinese lunar explorer Jade Rabbit caught my eye. At the edge of a crater, a shadow blurs from its crisp edge as if something with absurdly long limbs and weeds for hair had ducked the instant the shutter snapped. I rubbed at my chest to soothe my hammering heart, and my mouth watered at the sudden memory of orange Nehi on my tongue.



And while I can’t speak for Mars, I am certain that there is at least one little green man on the moon. And while I can’t blast off to the moon myself, or visit a spaceport in my hometown, rockets launch from Cape Canaveral each year. I’ll have my tickets and bottle rockets ready.

Moonshot – Part One

Image by Fir002 via Wikimedia Commons

Our house was hidden in the shadow of three hills, twenty miles away from the nearest gas station. As a kid, I never questioned having an hour’s bus ride each morning and afternoon. I took it as a fact of life that everyone spent an entire Saturday driving to a grocery store and filling up three carts with two weeks’ worth of food. Once or twice a year, I saved enough of my allowance to get a comic book or magazine for the way home, but mostly I looked out the window at the passing pine trees, scrub, swamps, and gravel driveways that led to homes unseen. I figured that was just the way life was for everyone, including the thin green man who lived at the edge of the fog.

Science was my favorite subject in school. I loved building terrariums and watching cricket larvae grow into full-sized bugs. I’d get up really close to their faces and freak myself out imagining them crawling into my nose and eating my brains. When I told this to another second-grader, he laughed, but never picked one up again as far as I could tell. In another unit, we learned all about the planets and spent two days on the moon. This was during the space race, so I wasn’t alone in dreaming about climbing into a silver space suit and blasting off from Cape Canaveral. I would be the first kid to discover moon crickets. The teacher said there weren’t any crickets on the moon, but I would have bet my whole allowance that there were.

I’d walk the hills around my house, flipping over rocks to see what the ants were up to. When the shadows got long, just before I would have to go home, I’d feel the thin green man watching me. I couldn’t see him directly. Just a hint of movement behind a tree if I turned around suddenly, or a flicker at the corners of my vision. At night, I watched from my window as it slipped between the fog and the shadows. I never got a clear look, but it was like someone took a leprechaun and stretched it as tall as my mother. Its arms were like chewing gum and its hair and beard may have been weeds. Then I found that if I sat on a particular rock on the southern hill and closed my eyes, it would come and stand behind me. I would talk about what had gone on in school that day, and it would grunt, hiss, or make some other sound in response.

“We feed the crickets lettuce,” I said. “I think they like it.”

“They don’t like it any more than you do,” it said. Its voice crackled as it talked, like tiny twigs cracking, or blowing up an old balloon from the bottom of the drawer. I turned, surprised. I caught a flash of green ducking behind a tree. When I got up and looked, it was gone. It tsked at me from somewhere I couldn’t make out.

“Sorry,” I said.

The next day, I sat on the same rock and forced myself to stare ahead. Its shadow came and stood next to mine.

“Why don’t crickets like lettuce?’ I said.

“Because it tastes tame. Wild crickets need wild food.”

“It didn’t say that in our science books.”

“That’s because the people who write science books can’t say things like that, even if they know better. “

“How do you know that?”

“Because I used to write science books too, a long time ago,” it said.

“But not now,” I said.

It shifted from foot to foot behind me for a few moments. “No. Not now.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m studying your hills. This place is one of the last unexplored places in the world.”

“No it’s not. There’s the North Pole, South Pole, and that big desert in Africa.”

“Just because your people haven’t been there before, doesn’t mean those places are unexplored.”

“So you’re an explorer?” I said.

“I’m learning why the rocks in these hills are yellow and not red.”

“Oh.” That sounded about as interesting as what my dad did every day. “So will my cricket starve?”

“No. It will eat the lettuce. It has no other choice.”

“I have to eat my beets when we have them for dinner. I don’t like them. Do you have to eat your beets?”

The thin green man blew out a puff of air, which I thought was its way of laughing. “No, I don’t have to eat beets.”

“Lucky.”

“I don’t get ice cream either,” it said.

It left while I considered if never having to eat beets again was worth giving up ice cream forever. I still haven’t figured that one out.

*

“They’re going to send an astronaut to the moon. He’s going to get into a big rocket and blast off from Florida. He’ll smash into the moon, get out and claim it for America, and then build a log cabin and start a city. By the time I grow up, I’m going to live there too.”

“Really?” it said, “And what will you do on the moon?”

“I’m going to own a candy factory or an ice cream factory. I’m not sure which. Maybe I’ll have one of each and fly my jetpack between them when I need to tell the robots what to do.”

“That sounds like a fine plan.”

“You can come too.”

“What an interesting idea, thank you,” it said.

*

I began to wonder if the green man had somehow talked to my parents because we didn’t have ice cream for a long time. I couldn’t have and comics or magazines either. I just about cried by eyes out when Mom wouldn’t let me have a bag of Fritos for the school picnic, and I had to go with just a bologna sandwich and a handful of peanuts. She made me a cookie, but it was oatmeal. When I saw that David Haskins had ham and cheese on a bun, with barbeque chips and two chocolate chip cookies in his lunch bag, I began to think maybe the other kids I knew lived exciting, wonderful lives while I was stuck in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they never had to go to the grocery store at all.

The day after the picnic, school let out, and I was stuck helping Mom with chores, which I thought she just made up on the spot. There couldn’t possibly be that many things to clean or weeds to pull. Who cared about weeds anyway? Why did the grass and plants on the hills turn into weeds as soon as they crossed a line in Mom’s head? Mom never made sense when I asked her, so I stopped asking her. In the afternoons, I fled to the hills and beat on trees with sticks, or pretended I was bowling by rolling rocks down the slopes into anthills. It was going to be the worst summer ever, I could tell.

I told the little green man this, but it didn’t seem to care. It kept telling me about the rocks under the hills and asking me questions about the space program I didn’t know the answers to. When are they going? Where is their rocket? How long are they staying? How many rockets will there be? I finally began leaving Mom’s Time magazines on the rock for him to read, but I warned him there weren’t any jetpacks in them.

Then in the beginning of July, my dad announced that we were going to Florida to see Apollo 11 blast off. I could take my binoculars, though not my space helmet made from a Jiffy Pop bag. I think I spent the entire night looking out my bedroom window until the moon passed over the roof.

When I told the thin green man, it went still for a few moments. Then it wheezed.

“Can you take me with you?”

“I suppose so, but wouldn’t everyone be able to see you?”

“I might be able to fit in a place with enough shadow. A suitcase, a box, or even,” His taffy-thin shadow pointed at my shadow’s hip. “…in your pocket.”

“My pocket?”



“Yes, and I will need your help with one other thing.”

Lend Me Your Ears

By Bettyann Moore

Cecil Hampton had just one more stop and then he could head home. These four-week sales trips were killing him. Sure, he’d made a few bucks along the way, but it was mostly drunken schmoozing and he was getting too damn old for that. And the young twits he had to deal with these days, with their tightly-held belief in their own Golden entitlement! Thank God Cecil had a hollow leg and could drink the snot-nosed little shits under the table. He loved nothing more than to get their signatures on the dotted line bright and early on the day after a “sales meeting.” Still, it was getting harder and harder for Cecil to keep up.

His dour mood deepened as he aimed his Ford Escort toward the home offices of TrustUS, Inc., his largest and least favorite client. The operation might be high-class – plush offices, squeaky-clean manufacturing floor and a polite and welcoming staff – but it was run by a ball-buster by the name of Janet Sommers who was as mean as she was gorgeous. There wouldn’t be any shots of tequila at some dive, nor visits to the local strip club; all business would be conducted in a well-appointed TU, Inc. meeting room where Cecil would be expected to jump through hoops, juggle balls and sell, sell, sell. And there Janet Sommers would sit, looking at him like he was some sort of slimy microbe. He wouldn’t doubt that she had the room fumigated after he left.

Cecil drained more than half of the Coke he’d opened earlier and with one hand still on the wheel, managed to add some rum to the remainder. He’d had a lot of practice. What really galled him was how his wife teased him about TU, Inc. and Janet Sommers. “Saving the best for last again, dear?” she always said. “Have a little crush on Ms. Sommers, hmmm?” 

I really should give the old battleax a call, Cecil thought, meaning Linda, his wife. It’d been almost a week since he last talked to her and she’d sounded kind of funny on the phone, sad maybe. Probably missing me, he thought, probably just lonely. “Ha!” he said aloud, “she doesn’t know crap about being lonely!” He took a large swig of his fortified Coke, then cranked up the volume on the Elvis’ Greatest Hits tape that was his constant companion and started singing along.

Twenty minutes later, after the King had failed to take the edge off his foul mood, Cecil saw something he didn’t see every day – a hitchhiker and a female one at that. She was holding a sign that said AUSTIN in big, black letters. It’d been close to ten years since he’d picked up a hitchhiker. When he quit, the people who had told him all the horror stories about crack addicts who didn’t need a reason to slit your throat and take everything you had, the gangbangers looking to satisfy some gruesome initiation right, applauded his decision, and he let them. A self-admitted motormouth who loved an audience, Cecil missed the company.

He hesitated, but not too long. He put on his blinker and pulled over a dozen yards ahead of her. He watched through the rearview mirror as the tall, skinny girl scurried toward the car, a big grin on her face. The smile made Cecil feel like a knight in shining armor. He reached for the passenger door and had it open for her when she came alongside the car.

“Good morning, little lady!” Cecil greeted the girl as she slid into the seat and reached for the seatbelt. She was still smiling as she settled her backpack on her lap, then flipped the AUSTIN sign over and pointed at was written on the back.

Thank you for the ride, it said, but I cannot hear or speak. I hope that doesn’t cause you any discomfort. My name is Emily.

Cecil’s immediate reaction was yeah, it does cause me some discomfort, but when he raised his eyes and saw the imploring look on her plain, thin face, he smiled one of his best salesman smiles and gave an exaggerated shrug. He flipped on the other blinker and pulled out onto the nearly-empty highway while the girl made herself more comfortable and stared straight ahead.

Well, crap, Cecil thought, this won’t be much better than driving alone.He reached over and pulled out the Elvis tape and replaced it with Springsteen. If the King couldn’t do it, maybe the Boss could.

“Born in the USA!” Cecil started singing along, loudly. Then he remembered he wasn’t alone. Then he remembered that his passenger was deaf so he continued singing, tapping his hands against the steering wheel and rocking in his seat, like he usually did. He glanced over at the girl – Emily, he recalled – and saw that she was smiling at his performance. He contorted his face in what he hoped conveyed approval and gave her a thumbs-up.

She mirrored his expression and gave him a thumbs-up as well. Cecil remembered reading that deaf people could feel the vibrations from music, especially the bass, and could actually enjoy the “sound”. He reached over and cranked up the bass, just for her. He took another drink from the can he kept between his legs, then tapped the girl on the shoulder and pointed to a cooler on the back seat. She smiled again and shook her head. He wondered if she read lips. He pointed to his own mouth and asked, drawing out the vowel sounds. His lips felt huge. She cocked her head, furrowed her brow and shrugged. Cecil took that as a “no.”

Defeated, Cecil turned down the volume and sucked gloomily on his drink.

“It’s not like anyone listens to me anyway,” he said. “My wife, my boss, my clients … at least you have an excuse.” He realized that, indeed, no one was listening to him now, but that had never stopped him before. He cut his eyes at the girl; his rambling and gesturing didn’t seem to faze her in the least.

“You seem like a nice kid,” he said. “But you sure got the short end of the stick. I can’t imagine not being able to hear … or talk! Of course some people shouldn’t talk at all. They should just keep their freakin’ mouths shut ...” he trailed off, frowning. He drained the last of his drink and threw the can into the back seat. He wanted another, but figured the girl would flip out if she knew about the rum; she’d want to get out. He wasn’t ready for that yet.

“Or maybe you’d want a drink, too,” he said. “Nah, you’re just a kid, a nice kid.” He took his eyes off the road and dared a long look. Emily shifted in her seat and blushed, but never stopped smiling. “See, look at that,” Cecil went on, gesturing at her. “Clean hair and clothes, no weird tattoos or piercings like that other bi ...” He trailed off again and stared out the windshield.

After a time, he started in again. “See that?” he said. “I can’t keep quiet. ‘Course with you, it’s like having my own personal priest, only better. I could tell you all sorts of crap and you’d just sit there and smile … a confessional on wheels! Ever think about renting yourself out? Ha!” Cecil almost reached over to pat Emily on the knee, but resisted.

“For instance,” he said, adjusting his rear view mirror, “I could tell you how sometimes I cheat on my taxes. Everyone does, though, right? Or about the time I found a wallet in a taxi and kept all the cash, just a couple hundred bucks. But I didn’t take the cards, nope. In fact I even mailed the thing back to the address on the driver’s license with a little note that said: ‘Hey, just be glad you got the wallet back and I didn’t take the cards.’ I thought that was a nice touch.”

Cecil went quiet again. He noticed he was going a bit too much over the speed limit, so he backed off some, causing the guy in the car behind him to lay on his horn and flip him off as he pulled out and sped past the Escort.

“Jerk,” Cecil muttered. “Serves you right for riding my ass.” He resisted the urge to speed up and ride the other guy’s tail for a while. “Too many people carry guns these days, though, it’s not worth it,” he grumbled.

Cecil watched the other car for a while, frowning. “Hey, that was pretty cool,” he said, brightening, “saying that stuff out loud for a change.” He started yelling random transgressions into the air. It was even better than singing. “When I was 16 I got a blow-job from another boy, and I liked it! I once ran over a dog and I didn’t go back to see if it was okay! Sometimes I eat my boogers! I killed a girl!”

He stopped.

“But she deserved it,” he added, looking over at Emily who had dug a book out of her backpack and was reading. “She really did. I should have known not to pick her up. Tank top with no bra. Short-shorts. Tattoos all over her arms. About 20 piercings on her ears, not to mention her nose and lip … another one ‘down there’ I found out. Nothing but a prick tease.”

God, it felt good to say it aloud.

“It wasn’t like I planned it or anything,” Cecil went on. “We were having a good time, laughing, talking. She keep telling these dirty jokes, really nasty ones that sort of got my blood boiling, you know? We were driving out on the Colorado plains, it was night, she had to stop to pee ...”

Cecil shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He might need to talk about it, but he sure as hell didn’t like thinking about it.

“Next thing I knew we were sort of wrestling there on the sand and she just started screaming and screaming … I had to shut her up. There was this rock … it was like it just appeared under my hand and …

Cecil swiped away a tear as unobtrusively as he could. No use upsetting the girl.

“And then, and then I just panicked. I walked around and around. I couldn’t put her back in the car. All that blood! And then I see this old windmill, not like the ones today, I mean old, with this round rock base and I check it out and I see that some of the rocks are loose so I’m digging around with my penknife and I pull a few out and I see that it’s hollow behind there like I hoped.”

Cecil’s mouth had gone dry as his words tumbled over each other. He reached into the back seat and pulled a Coke out of the cooler and downed it in a few seconds flat. He forgot to offer one to Emily.

“It was tough going, let me tell you.” He burped and then went on. “But I got her in there and sealed it back up. I don’t think anyone had been near the place in a hundred years. I see it in my dreams sometimes. I could find the place with my eyes closed even though it’ll be ten years in June. But I don’t go back there, oh no! I’m not stupid enough to return to the scene of the crime, that’s how you get caught. That, and talking about it. No worries there, though, right?” He shot a look at Emily who had closed her book and was looking out the window.

“I don’t even go to Colorado any more, took it right off my route.” Cecil sighed, then sighed again. What an incredible feeling to finally get it all off his chest. And just in time, too, he thought, noticing the sign for the turn-off he has to take to get to TU, Inc. He glanced at the dashboard clock. “Crap,” he said, “I’d take you all the way into Austin, but I’m already running late. And Ms. Janet Sommers doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” he added in a snotty tone.

Cecil slowed down the car, pulled off the road and stopped near a road sign. Emily looked at him with a question on her face. He pointed to the sign, which read Austin – 60 miles, and then pointed to Emily. He then pointed to a road that ran perpendicular to the highway they were on and poked himself on the chest, giving the girl a sorry face. She understood and began putting her book back into her backpack. She reached for the door handle, then turned to Cecil with a huge grin. She raised the flat of her hand to her chin, then pulled it away, then did it again.

Cecil didn’t know sign language, but he gathered this meant “thank you.” He wished he knew the sign for “you’re welcome,” though he felt like it was he who should thank her. Out on the side of the road, she gave him a little wave and another thank you sign. Cecil tooted his horn as he drove away, feeling better than he had in ten years, washed clean, redeemed.

A couple of hours later, Emily pulled open her dorm room door and threw her backpack on her narrow bed.

“Yo, Em,” her roommate said, “about time you got back. Did you forget about the Spearhead concert? Man, you look like shit.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Emily answered, “you’d look like shit, too, if you had the kind of day I had. I’ll tell you all about it in a few. I have to make a phone call first. Do you think campus security has the FBI’s number?”

Seasonal Employment

By Colleen Sutherland

Morton Gallagher almost reached the office of the Glen Valley Middle School when the stream of retching green teenagers swarmed toward him, their urgency forcing him toward the exit. They pushed him out the big entrance door. He joined them at the plastic lined barrels that served as trash containers. They all leaned over and began to spew out the contents of the school lunch. Beanie Weenies, some kind of Michelle Obama green vegetable, followed by what looked like blood but was probably cherry gelatin that had served as dessert. Steam poured out of the receptacles as the hot vomit met the frigid January air. It reminded Mort of fog scenes in British railroad stations in film noir post war movies.

Morton pushed a snot-nosed boy aside he had last seen throwing spitballs in third hour World lit class. Together they cleaned their stomachs into the barrel while Mort held his substitute teacher paperwork up high to protect it. Spewing up his lunch was not part of the substitute deal and he sure wasn't going to give up payment for his day at the middle school.

The school librarian and head of the teachers' union found him there.

“Did you hear?” she called out to him. “School's being closed for the next month because of the flu outbreak.”

“I figured it would be,” Mort said.

“Well worth the cost,” Mrs Ergot said.

“Might as well finish up then.”

She followed him to his Mini Cooper. It was at the edge of the ditch on the highway. By the tracks he could see that his little car had been carried there by husky farm boys. Another prank pulled on the substitute teacher. It made him feel better about the transaction he and the librarian were carrying out.

He pulled some paper toweling out of the trunk, handed a few pieces to Mrs. Ergot and used some more to wipe off his face.

“Always a gentleman, Mort. You think of everything, don't you.”

“Well, if I want to be asked back, I have to be efficient,” he said.

He pulled out a thermos jug and poured her some hot tea and two capsules. She swallowed them down with the tea.

“It should work in about an hour," he said, and took his own capsules.

He dug out a box containing more capsule in vials. “You can share these in the teachers' lounge," he said. “There's enough for everyone."

“What about the kids?”

“They're on their own.” Mort pointed to the row of yellow buses chugging up the drive. “I hope the school bus drivers have the mops to clean up afterward. I did leave instructions about that.”

The librarian held out a brown manila envelope to him. It had been marked “Lesson Plans” with a black Sharpie.

“Nice touch,” Mort said as he plopped the envelope on top of his substitute paperwork. That should impress the principal. Thank your co-workers for putting together good lesson plans,” he added.

“I thought it was time for them to be exposed to Poe and when you suggested "The Masque of Red Death", I thought, how appropriate!”

“I was particularly glad to see the DVD of the Ken Burns documentary on the 1918 flu pandemic for fourth hour world history. If they weren’t feeling nauseous before, that got to them. Tell Mr. Peterman thanks for the good lesson plan.”

Mort handed Mrs. Ergot another packet. “Here's your itinerary. Plenty of copies for everyone You all just meet Kate from Midwest Tours at the airport tomorrow and you're on you way. You should be in Cancun by 4:00 tomorrow afternoon. I enclosed more of my cards, too."

“Great, Mort, we'll be sure to hand them out at the state teachers' conference next October."

Secret Identity

Photo by Christian Bauer via Wikimedia Commons

George Romero stood before the painting, feeling the sudden need for a bathroom. The woman in yellow stood behind his shoulder, hissing in his ear.

“She is such a visionary, my dear. The brushwork alone makes me want to tear my eyes out,” she said. Cigarette breath mixed with eye-watering perfume.

George twisted the cocktail napkin in his hands. The cardinal rule was to keep moving, but he had stopped. He had leaned against the wall to ease the burning in his legs from the countless circuits of the gallery and from a full twelve-hour shift on the factory floor earlier in the day. A moment's rest surely would be safe, he had thought, but the woman in yellow must have sensed he didn’t belong and pounced in his moment of weakness. 

“How much?” he asked, nodding at the painting.

She laughed. “Oh you had to ask, didn't you?” She sighed and glanced at the floor.

George looked down and plucked at his pant leg to better cover his steel-toed shoes. Why on Earth had he worn white socks? She was laughing at him. She would go back to the cluster of anorexics in their black dresses and mascara and have them all look at him with pity. They'd shame him right out of the place.

Then a thought struck him. He took in a deep breath and let it out, the same way he did on the factory floor when the engineer swore that the machine’s latest software fix had nothing to do with it suddenly spewing material all over the floor.

“I meant the price differential,” he said.

The woman in yellow stepped around and looked at him directly with her pale eyes. “I'm sorry dear, differential?”

“Yes.” he said, slowing down his speech. “What is the differential between the appraisal and the asking price?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“Because every piece that I buy has to be ten or better. Anything less and I may as well be a charity.” Best to be deliberately vague and use jargon. Engineers would rather nod along with made-up nonsense than admit they didn’t know what you were talking about. Maybe it worked with curators in yellow dresses too.

“I see,” she said. She narrowed her eyes and drew her smile tighter. “We obviously can't have that. This particular piece is offered four thousand below appraised value, but we can negotiate on that.”

George felt his testicles shrink into his body. “Thousand?”

A confidant nod. “Thousand.” She began to turn away. Busted? He’d outwitted the best minds of the top three Polytechnics in the country. Maybe not all the time, but he had learned enough to have one more card to play. George lifted his chin and spoke a little louder.

“I'm talking points, not dollars,” he said. He didn’t know what the hell that meant, but he was willing to bet neither did the woman in yellow. He held his hand out to the painting. “As much as the color, brushwork, and all the rest is nice, certainly the joy of having it for yourself is knowing how undervalued others find it. If you’re just quoting prices, you’re missing the point.”

“I'm sure I don't follow.”

“If you did, your gallery would double its sales.” He said. He reached into his jacket pocket and handed her a card. “When you're serious about selling this piece and the next five of hers you have on commission, give me a call.”

He pushed past her, carefully blowing out until he was out of her perfume's range. He plucked a toothpick-skewered  melon ball and prosciutto appetizer from a passing hostess without breaking stride. “Mister Stepanski,” the curator called after him, but he kept walking until he was out of the gallery. He didn't stop until he was two blocks away. It had been a near thing, but he had eaten enough appetizers to replace dinner. The plastic bags in his pockets held enough cheese cubes and crackers for next week’s snacks at work. He'd have to cross the gallery off his list though, which was too bad. Their catering had the finest selection of cheese, plus champagne more often than not. Oh well, the doctor told him to watch his cholesterol anyway. Wasn’t the hospital holding a fundraiser ball next week? They put out a decent spread.

He would give a lot to see Stepanski's face when the dealer called him. Serve the engineer right: his last program change cost George and his crew two hours of down time, making them miss their monthly production goal (along with its five-dollar gas card). Never give the engineer an even break; it keeps them from getting into mischief.

George Romero walked down the street, looking for dessert.