It Came From Space

At first we didn’t believe it. A new number between 8 and 9? Not some fraction or another not-quite-random decimal, but a whole number? Get out! It had to be a hoax, like Piltdown Man or Pluto. Or something those crazy liberal academics came up with in their faux-ivory towers, like quantum physics or global warming or history. I mean, we’d been counting the same way for thousands of years. There was a number we’d been missing all that time? It was ridiculous.

But the professor from WVU announcing her discovery on television seemed very credible. And it soon became clear that the new number was very real.

The Shape of Things

It is easy to imagine the shape of things, to feel their contours in the flex and press of your palm: the curve of a woman’s side, the stiched roundness of a baseball, the ribbed flatness of a guitar’s fingerboard.

But try to imagine them without their familiar shapes. Imagine a woman as a set of overlapping triangles, all sharp corners and straight lines. Or a baseball with a handle like a teacup and a snout like a watering can. Imagine a guitar with a saxophone’s keys – you play it with muffled hammers like the strings of a piano.

Would you love her any less, your spiky angular wife? Would you still smile at the sound of her laugh from the living room, rising over the rattle of popcorn cooking in the microwave? Would you still remember sliding into third behind rented cleats and a cloud of red dust, hoping the baseman’s net wouldn’t hold the ball over you? Would you still hear “Layla” and stop in wonder, even in the middle of a sidewalk rushing like snowmelt down a steep ravine?

 

Kittens

Imagine a kitten made of Christmas paper. Varicolored and crinkled balls of discarded wrap mashed together in the shape of a kitten. It peeks at you from behind the ottoman, pounces on your feet as you pad to the kitchen for more cocoa, and gets distracted by its own crinkliness.
Or a kitten made of ice. Perhaps this is a cat best petted in summer, when the days are long and the sun lingers like a once-welcome guest.
In Bhutan, the kings used to demand of their sorcerers kittens made of mother-of-pearl: striking creatures, sleek and gleaming as they race between the pillars and flash in the light slanting through the windows. By night they glowed like ghosts and the rats fled in terror.
The queens of Atlantis were more practical. They bred cats with claws like glass. It was said that if you could see your reflection in the cat’s claw it would show you an image of yourself in the hour of your death. Atlantean cats were widely renowned for their intelligence and loyalty.
But you probably have an ordinary cat: a slender creature like grace embodied and fur-coated, someone that wakes you in the morning with a nuzzle and a soft cry. We live in impoverished times.

The Prick of a Single Thorn

His eyes felt like granite, like shaped stone: lifelike but lifeless, a facsimile of something fonder. Alice nodded once, picked up her purse, and left without a word.

Her hands were tight on the wheel. Ten and two, always ten and two, he said. She jerked them a little farther down the wheel and switched on the wipers. The headlights made sparks of the thick falling drops. She backed out without looking, looked at his door as she put the car in drive, and drove away.

The stop sign kept vanishing behind night-blacked branches. She sat there longer than she had to. There was no one else on the road. It was late, and it was raining, and there was no one else on the road. She sat there staring down the length of her headlights. The rain hammered the thin metal of the roof. Alice closed her eyes. Behind her the taillights made a lurid smear of the world.

She let out a long breath and crossed the intersection. An elm leaf stuck to the window. The wiper blade pushed it around the windshield, but the water had sealed it to the glass. The serrations reminded her of a steak knife. There was something disturbing in calling a series of short sharp tears a cut. A cut was neat, clean, precise. Steak is torn, not cut.

Alice left the radio off. The tires hissed over the road. She hit a pothole harder than she should have and it jerked the belt tight across her chest. The water flew away like sheets thrown over a bed. Ragged edges, frayed ends. A thorn snagged on clean white cotton: brown against white, wood on fiber, the flower forgotten and the snag growing. Torn, not cut.

Not his things, so not him? It wasn’t like that, except to him. He lived a web of polished steel chains, measured and exact. She was the seed clinging to the wind on a gossamer stalk.

A gust carried the elm leaf back into the dark. A car going the other way passed her behind its cloud of diamonds. Neat edges, cut sharp. Champagne gold, white sheets, and the textured brown thorn. Browned meat, red blood, and granite eyes. And the prick of a single thorn he let tear the tight weave like cold steel through warmed flesh.

Rule No. 4

“Je-sus CHRIST,” Zack said, jerking his chin toward the front of the store. Matt looked up from the box of staplers he was stocking.

The girl coming up the aisle was gorgeous. Honey-blonde bangs just brushing her enormous movie-star sunglasses, which were perched on an adorable little button nose over full, wide lips in a slightly lopsided smile. She moved toward them with an easy athletic grace. She was wearing a t-shirt and shorts with a backpack slung over one shoulder, but it was easy to imagine her in a sleek Lycra swimsuit with her hair tucked under a skullcap, waiting for the race to start.

It was also easy to ignore the guy holding her right hand.

“Crap,” Matt said under his breath. “It’s her.”