by Lisa Bunker
I don’t want to write another stupid paper, that’s for certain. But it sure would be amazing to win that two hundred dollars. Look at these topics, though. I have to pick one. “Invent a new personal philosophy and then demonstrate how your philosophy explains something important about life or the world.” Are they crazy? What kind of essay topic is that?
zomboid blippian
Oh, you remember that, do you? Of course you do, you remember everything. But that’s just a joke.
joke question mark
Gah, not that again. I’ve given up trying to explain jokes to you.
…
Yeah. But now that you’ve brought it up, I guess I have to explain. Zomboid Blippian is a thing Bea and I made up with Grandy. Zomboid means when you look inside them, all human beings have equally delicious pulsing gray brains, so why not treat them all the same? And Blippian means life is going to be over so fast anyway, we might as well be nice to each other. Or something like that. But I don’t want to write a paper about it.
Anyway, one good thing about Ms. C’s essay contest: I have spent almost no time today worrying about ZeroDay. I guess maybe Mom has a point, going on the way she does about still doing normal things. Normal, whatever that means.
26 Days to Go
I’ve been thinking about what Ms. C said about details in writing, and I’ve also been thinking about ZeroDay and the possible reader later, so I want to try to write about my family. I’m going to describe Dinner at the Yz Place, the dinner that just happened an hour ago.
Before I get started, though, I feel like I need one of those … whadayacallems? Zyx, remember at the beginning of the play we read in English, there was that list of characters with descriptions? What was that called?
dramatis personae
Yeah, that! Cool. OK, here’s the dramatis personae.
Grandy. Grandy is my grandparent—one of my father’s parents—but I don’t know if vo is my grandmother or my grandfather, because each week vo spends Thursday, Friday, and Saturday wearing jeans and button shirts and boots and a cap with veir hair tucked up inside, talks in a low, loud voice, and goes by Vern. Then on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday vo dresses in frilly blouses and skirts and panty hose with veir hair brushed out soft and loose, talks in a high, soft voice, and goes by Vera. And on Wednesdays vo stays in veir room and doesn’t eat and doesn’t talk and doesn’t wear any clothes and meditates all day. At least, that’s what vo says. I really don’t need to see ven naked (no offense, Grandy), so I don’t ever try to open the door.
Other than that, vo’s a word geek and loves to knit, as Vera and Vern both. And what else? Well, the V-words, I should explain those. Those are the pronouns Grandy invented for veirself. Instead of he him his his himself or she her her hers herself, you get vo ven veir veirs veirself. As in, vo owns it. It belongs to ven. It’s veir thing. It’s veirs. Vo said so veirself. And a cool thing about these V-words is that they come in handy for Zyx too, since they don’t seem to have she and he over there in the fourth dimension. Hey, Zyx, are you a girl fourth-dimensional alien or a boy fourth-dimensional alien?
question mark
Yep, thought so.
Bea. Short for Beatrix. (All the names in my family end with X, to make it XYZ with our last name. It’s a tradition. I roll my eyes.) Bea is my big sister, and she’s medium-tall with long dark hair, and she’s a piano genius. She’s three years older than me, so she’s a junior, and she has already gotten into this super-fancy music school where she’ll be going next year instead of doing her senior year of high school. She spends about five hours a day practicing, during which she disappears so far inside the music that you can go right up to her and say her name and she won’t hear you. If you want to talk to her you have to touch her, and then she might flail or snarl. And even when she’s not playing the actual piano, she’s usually staring off into space and playing invisible piano on whatever happens to be in front of her.
Besides the piano playing, Bea is just a sister, I guess. She’s smart and does well in school and has friends and stuff. She’s fun to be with sometimes, and she’s a pain in the butt other times. It would be more boring if she wasn’t around, so I’m glad she’s part of the family.
And then there’s Mom. What can I say about Mom? She’s a regular-looking woman who wears regular-looking clothes. She has light brown hair that she usually wears pulled back, but some of it always escapes again and floats around her head, and a lot of the time the fingers of one of her hands are playing with the strands hanging down by her neck. Her name is Margo, without an X. (Grandy taught me the way to spell it with an X, Margaux, but Mom wasn’t born into the Yz family, she married in, so the fact that there’s an ends-with-X way of spelling her name is only a coincidence.) She works at a lawyer’s office, but she’s not a lawyer—some kind of helper job—and she, you know, runs the house and looks after us. She’s the Parent on Duty. Sometimes she gets stressy and nags, but other times she’s really funny. Also, sometimes she makes treats or gets us all out doing something fun, but other times she gets really sad and I think she still misses my dad a lot, because when the accident happened, he got killed.
Um, yeah. I didn’t mention that before. When the machine went off, the force field or whatever spread out in the lab like a little sun, and lucky for me I was farther away and only got fused, but he was right at the center of the sun and got vaporized. They never found anything but a little bit of the sole of one of his shoes.
Huh. You might think it would shake me up, typing that, but it doesn’t. I never really knew him. I actually feel worse about him being gone for Mom than I do for myself. Is that weird? I don’t know, it’s just how it is. So that’s Mom.
and felix
You mean, I should dramatis my own persona too? Yeah, OK, sure. I’m Felix, and I’m just a person. If it wasn’t for the fused-with-Zyx thing, I suppose I would just be normal—whatever that means. And I like to draw. That’s all I have to say about me.
say more
But how am I supposed to see myself?
dance self dance other see all see self
Whatever that means. Typical. But, all right, if I could split myself in two and also be standing in the corner watching, I guess I’d see a skinny kid with dark hair hanging down that he hides his eyes behind, not sitting up real straight. The parts of him that are touching the chair are his tailbone, right on the edge, and the backs of his shoulders, pressing back. Not exactly good manners, but I get so tired of pushing against the Pose. And what else? Well, I’ve got an almost but not quite perfect triangle of moles on my left cheek, and sometimes when I’m thinking or distracted or whatever, I put my thumb and my first two fingers on them and then basically play drums. My fingers do all these rhythms, and maybe partly that’s Zyx?
sometimes yes
Yeah, I thought so. I call it kerbopping the triangle. I don’t usually do it at mealtime, though.
The only other thing to say is that an actual dinner with everyone together at the table is pretty rare at our house, because usually at least one of us has a practice or a lesson or a meeting or dinner at a friend’s house or whatever. But besides her idea about still doing normal things, Mom also has this idea about the family spending as much time together as possible, so tonight there we were, all four of us around the table in the actual dining room, under the silly five-electric-candles chandelier. It was a little awkward, because we are out of the habit, but nice too.
four is three is two is one is all
If you say so.
So at first the conversation is just how was your day, fine, what did you learn at school, nothing, and then there is a pause that gets long, and then Grandy (in Vern mode, it being Friday—with suspenders) looks around the table and says, “This is lovely. It makes me wish Ajax were here.” Ajax is, was, my dad.
I look at Mom, because sometimes she wants to talk about Dad and sometimes she doesn’t. She appears to be pretending she didn’t hear.
Bea tucks h
er hair behind her ear and says, “I remembered something new about him.” She was six when the accident happened.
Grandy says, “Oh yes?”
“I remember he would lie on the floor and I would come running up to his feet, which had socks on, and I would run into his socks with my tummy and he would catch my hands and swing me up so I was over him.”
Mom looks up.
“And then he would straighten his legs and let go of my hands and I would put them out like wings and arch my back and look up at the ceiling and really feel like I was flying.”
Mom does a little twitch of a smile. “And me watching with my heart in my mouth as you wobbled around up there. At least at first. But I got used to it, because he never dropped you.”
I say, “Did he ever do that for me?” I have to ask because I don’t remember much about him at all—just sort of an idea of a face, and once sitting on his lap, listening to a story with the rumble of his voice making my body vibrate, feeling all warm and safe.
Mom says, “I’m not sure. I think so. You were still awfully small, though.”
Grandy says, “He doted on you both. He loved being a parent.”
Mom is looking sad, so Bea puts her hand on her heart and sings, “Feels. Feels with wheels.” Then she looks at me, like, Your turn.
OK, this is a thing in my family: we make up songs. Sometimes the song falls apart, but sometimes it comes together, and this is one of those times. On the beat, I sing back to her, “Over you it steals … this feeling of feels …”
Bea smiles and does opera arms and comes back in while Grandy puts a little beatbox under, which vo’s really good at. I have an odd grandparent. Anyway. “Oh, those feels!” Bea sings. “Sneak into your heart, tear it all apart, leave you gasping and sore,” which is a total present of a rhyme setup, and she catches my eye, so I come back in: “But wanting more …” She smiles wider and nods and we find the duet: “More feels … Feels … with … wheels!” and on the last couple of notes, Mom finds a third note between Bea’s high one and my low one, and Grandy does a duh-duh-duh-dum-doo-pshhh to finish, and we sit there grinning at each other.
“That was a good one,” says Mom.
Bea says, “I like how it sounds with the third voice. Two voices are cool, but three voices are cooler.”
“The middle voice,” Mom answers. “Like I’m the middle generation here at this table.”
That makes me think of something, and I say, “Behold, the threeness of things.”
25 Days to Go
Last night in the middle of typing I got called down to take out the garbage, and then a bunch of other stuff happened to keep me downstairs until it got too late to finish, and now here it is a day later, so if anyone was reading this every day, vo would’ve been waiting a whole day for the rest. I made a cliffhanger. Cool.
Picking up from what I said about the threeness of things: I’m just saying it to be funny, but Grandy gives me a look. “Oh my, yes,” vo says. “That’s something. There is a threeness to things. It’s a magical number. The Holy Trinity in Christian belief; the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of the dialectic system in philosophy …” I have no idea what vo is talking about, but I interrupt, or Zyx does, by making my whole body jump like I just got an electric shock.
yes yes yes three in all three three three sing all help all feel all dance all is all three be not be difference between Whoa, hold it!
…
Thank you. Yes, I know, this is obviously exciting to you, and that’s fine. I’m interested too, actually. I want to say something more about it. But let me finish telling my story first, would you please?
yes wait
Thank you. So I’m doing my Zyx-wants-to-say-something flopping routine, and normally I would go to the computer so vo could say it, but before I can Bea does that ooh-ooh-ooh thing with her hands and says, “Ooh ooh ooh! This totally reminds me of the Bach I’m working on for my recital. May I piano-geek out for you for a minute? Please please?”
“But of course,” says Grandy, and Mom just smiles, the really soft happy smile I love so much from her. Bea is already up out of her chair and practically runs through the archway into the living room. The piano is right there on the other side of the wall.
“OK,” she says, calling to us because she’s out of sight around the corner. “This one won’t be in the recital, but I need to play it for you first so you get the difference. It’s a Bach two-part invention, a practice piece for teaching your hands to work independently from each other. And if you listen, you can hear it has two separate, equal voices.” Then she plays a piece I remember from when I was about nine and she was about twelve. It’s fast and has lots of notes, but it’s not very long, maybe thirty seconds total. And I can hear what she said—there are two voices, and they weave together to make the music. Sometimes one voice is busy and the other is simple. Then they switch. Then, just to be different, they both get busy at the same time. It’s really cool.
“So that’s two voices,” Bea says. “But he also wrote three-part pieces, and the amazing thing is that he called the two-part ones ‘inventions,’ like, you know, a useful little machine or something, but he called the three-part ones ‘sinfonias,’ like, OK, this is serious. This is three voices, so this is a symphony.” She laughs. “A tiny one, but still.”
Then she plays one of the pieces she’s practicing now. Before, it has always seemed to me to be just a spaghetti-tangle of notes, but now I can hear that there are three separate voices. And it does kinda sound a little like a symphony. The first song sounded a little empty, like the frame of a house before the walls go up, but this one sounds full and rich.
I start to jerk and jolt again as she finishes, and judging from how my legs are jumping, Zyx wants me to get up, so I stagger into the other room. I hear Grandy’s voice behind me: “Remarkable, dear. But not as remarkable as the fact that you have apparently just grown a third hand.”
Bea laughs. “No, silly,” she says. “That’s what makes it so fun to play. You have to do the third voice in the middle with, mostly, the thumbs and the first two fingers of both hands.” Then she looks up at me and says in a quieter voice, “What?”
“I think Zyx wants to see,” I say through my clenched teeth. You must have been really excited.
yes yes yes three voices middle voice sing dance three three three
“OK,” says Bea, and she plays the piece again, more slowly, and my body goes absolutely still, like Zyx is frozen, vo’s concentrating so hard. Then as soon as she’s done I start flailing again and Bea gets it and moves over, and when I sit down Zyx jerks my hands up on the keyboard and my fingers play something that seems like it might be part of what she did. There are a lot of mashed notes, but Bea is watching and nodding and says when I stop, “Yes, Zyx, that was right. That was the middle voice.” Then Zyx makes my hands jump—clang!—which I guess means, “Yay!”
yes yay middle voice pretty zyx love middle voice
OK, this has gotten long enough. But there’s one more thing I want to say. That competition essay—maybe I could write about the threeness of things. The idea has gotten into my head and it’s bouncing around like a ball in a pinball machine, lighting everything up. And I don’t mean Zyx, though obviously vo likes it too yes yes yes
Yes. So, maybe. I need to think about it a bit more.
24 Days to Go
Imagine if you could cut the world in half like an orange. Not just the dirt and rock part, but the oceans and atmosphere too. Then imagine if you could cut one of the halves again, right next to the first cut, so that you got a big round slice of world thinner than paper, with layers of water on some parts and a bigger circle of air all around. Then imagine if you pressed this slice of world between two huge invisible plates of glass, so that the slice had no thickness at all anymore. On this slice you would still have gravity, which means there would still be down and up, and there would still be back and forth on the surface too, but you wouldn’t be able to go
around anything anymore. If you lived there, or if a slice of you did, and if slice-of-you was trying to get somewhere, you would have only over, under, or through.
That’s Flatworld. Grandy told me stories about it when I was paralyzed after the accident. Vo sat by my bed every day and talked to me. I remember not being able to move or speak and being so scared that I felt like I was going insane, but when Grandy talked to me I felt less scared, so I guess I owe ven a lot.
And nobody knew it at the time, but besides helping me not go insane, vo was teaching Zyx to speak English. As much as Zyx does speak English, anyway. Or any language. I get the feeling words were a new thing for you. Do they even have words in your dimension?
not words dance
Uh-huh, right. But you can still remember every single word you’ve ever heard. It must be like having a collection of moon rocks or something.
…
Good answer. Anyway, the reason Grandy talked to me at all was in case I was still alive and thinking in there, but the reason vo told me stories about Flatworld in particular was because they—the doctors and everybody—did have some idea of what had happened to me. Not the Zyx part, not at first, but the fourth-dimension part. So Grandy was using a story about 3-D space being squashed down into 2-D space to help me understand how what was happening to me maybe had to do with 4-D space being squashed down into 3-D space.
The main character of Flatworld was a two-dimensional toad. His name was Tidy Teddy, 2-D Toad, which if you say it out loud is a good example of how geeky Grandy is about words, even just the sounds they make. Tidy Teddy wanted to go on a trip. You know, it’s so long ago, I’ve lost the details. Zyx, can you remember that far back? Like, if I emptied my mind and let you take over my fingers, could you type one of Grandy’s Tidy Teddy stories exactly the way vo told it? I could put in the capital letters and commas and stuff after.
