Gravity Changes
Page 1
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Copyright © 2017 by Zach Powers
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Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding sources include the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester AreaCommunity Foundation; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 176 for special individual acknowledgments.
Cover Design: Sandy Knight
Cover Art: Invisible Cities by Matt Kish
Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster
Manufacturing: McNaughton & Gunn
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Powers, Zach, 1980– author.
Title: Gravity changes / Zach Powers.
Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY: BOA Editions Ltd., 2017. | Series: American readers series; 27
Identifiers: LCCN 2016051932| ISBN 9781942683384 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Imaginary places—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Fantasy / Contemporary. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.O94 .A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051932
BOA Editions, Ltd.
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A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)
In memory of Jeremy Mullins,
who knew most of these stories before they were written,
and to whom I owe an eternal debt.
CONTENTS
Gravity Changes
A Tinkle Is the Sound of Two Things Meeting but Failing to Merge
Joan Plays Power Ballads with Slightly Revised Lyrics
Children in Alaska
The Eating Habits of Famous Actors
Single
Cockpuncher
The Tunnels They Dig
When as Children We Acted Memorably
Use Your Spoon
This Next Song
One Has Hugs the Other Punches
The Loneliness of Large Bathrooms
Little Gray Moon
Extispicy
Unlearn to Seek
Undertaken
Sleeping Bears
My 9/11 Story
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Colophon
GRAVITY CHANGES
When I was a boy we walked on walls. The kids these days climb trees like it’s some sort of accomplishment. Look how high they go. How high! Nervous mothers look up at them and urge care, or coax them down with cookies to the flat, flat ground. Play in the mud and dirty your clothes, children. Press flat. Stay low.
I’m no physicist, so I can’t explain it. Gravity just worked different back then. I walked on the ground, came to a wall, and kept walking right up it. Oh, how I remember eaves and overhangs! Dangling upside down with the sidewalk overhead. We didn’t think of up and down, though. The ground was something different, we knew that, but down denotes the pull of gravity, and with the pull so uncertain we had no word to describe it.
In summer I would stand on the brick wall of the old bank building and drop a ball to my best friend who stood on the wall across the street. I say drop because, once released, the ball would fall away from me without propulsion. It simply fell, like it knew in which direction I wanted gravity to pull it. My friend would drop the ball from his side and it would fall back to me. Sometimes another friend would pass on the street below. We would drop the ball to him, and he, in turn, would drop it back to one of us. In the middle of the game one day, I missed the ball. It struck the wall and bounced off at a crazy angle, darting around in open space, like a hovering fly, until it finally fell to the ground and bounced to a halt.
From this, we first conceived the idea of flying. It was a simple act of will. I shouldn’t say simple. There were many bruises and busted noses as we perfected the process. Was it rightly flying? I don’t think so, not by the standards we have today, when flying is a fight against the concept of down, but we didn’t have that concept back then. In reality, we were falling, which I guess is the opposite of flying. But if you fall in one direction just a little faster than you’re falling in the other direction, then you can glide through the air, suspended between the warring tugs.
At first, we fell too fast, a dozen boys tumbling through the open space above Main Street. My best friend broke an arm on his initial attempt, falling uncontrolled from one wall to another and smacking with a gross crack against the orange bricks, just missing a window, which surely would have cut him all to hell. There were tears in his eyes but he wasn’t crying. He looked up at the wall he’d fallen from like it was a thing he didn’t understand. When he came back from the hospital his arm was encased in a bright white cast, which we all signed, and then he walked to the center of the wall and tried to fly again. He came back from the hospital a second time with a cast on his other arm, and we signed that one, too. Before he could try another flight his mother showed up. She took his hand and pulled him from the wall to the ground and led him away down the sidewalk. He was forced to stay in his room for the rest of the summer, pacing the floor, the walls, the ceiling.
By this point, a number of us had achieved our first jerky flights between buildings. The first time I flew it was like the opposite of a bouncing ball. I floated away from the wall, mere inches, then fell back. I floated a little farther, then fell back. Twice as far still, and then back. After a number of these inverse bounces, I reached the middle, dead center between the two walls. I fell back once more, and with a grin I’m sure was wide (missing, at the time, one baby tooth knocked out in a previous failed flight attempt), I pushed off and sailed across the expanse. As I neared the other side, I slowed myself, beckoning to the gravity of the other wall, and landed with just a tap of my toes against the brick.
The other boys cheered and laughed and smacked each other on the back. So much laughing! Even a few adults, watching from the street, clapped their approval. The adrenalin of success pumping through me, I pushed off again, reached the middle, that beautiful point of no return, and I stopped. I floated there. I spun myself, arms spread wide, above me the sky and below me the ground and vice versa. I list that moment with my wedding and the birth of my children as the happiest of my life. In fact, at the wedding, after kissing my bride, I stepped back and spread my arms and recreated that twirling triumph, this time on the ground, which by then had in fact become down and inescapable. I didn’t think it sad then, but looking back perhaps it was a dark gesture, though I’d intended exuberance. I’d intended nothing at all.
For the rest of the summer we floated between buildings, above the gr
ound. Seldom in the city did we walk. Flying became natural. While our parents had been skeptical after our initial injuries, they warmed to the practice, and eventually praised us for our grace. A few parents even joined in, but remained awkward in that way adults are when taking on something new so late in life. My own father tried to fly, but he never managed to get more than a few inches off the wall.
School began again in September. We returned to the tight hallways, where we floated from class to class. But as the year wore on, routine pressed down upon us and soon enough we were walking like everyone else. Outside the air grew colder, and the naked space between the flat walls seemed inhospitable. Only sometimes, in a moment of whimsy, would one of us rise from a wall, usually the old bank building, which somehow felt more solid than all the rest, and float against the biting winds that pushed harder than gravity pulled.
Even as the air warmed, we walked like everyone else. The heat hunched us over like something we carried on our backs. It was the first time I ever noticed the drops of sweat running down my face. I think we were still able to fly. It just never crossed our minds to make the attempt. Looking back, I’m not sure if it was the heat making us feel heavy, or our own heaviness that made us feel the heat.
In the sky, in our place, floated a group of boys too young the year before to participate. It was them turning in the air, gliding from point to point. Gliding to nowhere in particular. We looked up, not with envy, but with regret. That’s the only thing left when you land.
Slowly, without anyone noticing, without comment, we abandoned even the walls and walked only on the ground. The walls became something new, defined in terms different from the sidewalk. Even before gravity changed, our perception of the world had changed as if to accommodate what was to come. I remember the first time I went around a building instead of over it. It was the old bank, its walls a place I’d walked since I could remember. But that day, to even think of walking up it felt like effort. I turned and followed the sidewalk beside the wall, dragging my fingers across the brick. I wasn’t the only one grounded. My friends were right there with me, funneling through the streets of the city. We looked up from the ground at the new generation of flying children. Free, so free! And still we didn’t join them.
I came home from college, dressed in my school colors, and found the town I had left strangely flat. The walls still stood tall as ever, but I saw them as walls. In my education I had learned the word down, and my feet treated the concept as law. With each step, I reiterated my orientation. My legs felt heavy. Too heavy. I grew weary and leaned against the wall of the old bank. The brick pressed into my cheek, rough and wonderful. I pushed my palm into the surface, felt the skin take on the inverse of the jagged texture. So heavy! I sank to the ground, sat back against my beloved wall.
Above me I saw the current generation of flying children. One little girl was teaching herself how to fly, never venturing far from the wall from which she had launched, all the time looking up at her bolder friends. I felt lighter just watching them. They glided, as I once had. I remembered games played weightless in empty space. We’d swoop down on the girls and flip the backs of their skirts over their heads. We’d jump from the roofs of buildings and turn somersaults in the air, perform loops and cartwheels. We’d tie streamers to our feet, pretending to be kites.
I pushed against the ground, lifted myself up with difficulty.
I don’t know why, but that’s when it changed. That’s when gravity turned into what we know it as today. Down transformed from a concept to a fact, perpendicular became an impediment, and flight became impossible. I realized it, somewhere inside, even before the screaming.
The children fell from the sky. Dozens of them. I ran to where they were falling, I guess to try to catch them. They fell too fast. Their little throats screamed such high sweet notes that I cried even though the meaning of what was happening hadn’t sunk in. The screams stopped short with a series of noises I won’t relate, because I don’t have the language or the desire to relate them. Little bodies dotted the street, and the first of many mothers wailed. This new scream was deep and throaty and echoed between the walls.
The little body nearest me was mine. It felt like mine. I saw myself, the boy that I had been, dead on the street on the ground I’d once thought conquered. I felt nothing but a curious detachment. Had I a stick, I would have poked the body.
More parents screaming. Sirens in the distance, getting closer.
Below these louder sounds, I heard a whimper coming from above me. The little girl I’d noticed earlier hung from the gutter of the old bank. Her fingertips clutched the sharp edge of the metal, knuckles buckling under the unidirectional pull of this new gravity. I ran beneath her. Fall, I yelled. Come down. She looked at me, shook her head. It’s just like flying, I said. Let go and I’ll catch you. She shook her head again, but at the same moment her little fingers, bloody and tired, gave out and she fell. Down she came. She landed in my arms, and the weight of her knocked me to the ground. My head smacked against the pavement. Stars danced in the bright blue of the afternoon sky. The clouds remained aloft.
The whole town crowded into the cemetery. One by one the little caskets were lowered, down past the level of the ground.
I saw some of my old friends among the mourners. We didn’t speak to each other. I think we felt guilty. It was our summer of flight, which seemed impossibly long ago, that had led in the end to this. I comfort myself with the fact that everything ends with a funeral.
The little girl, the one I’d caught, huddled close to the thigh of her father, pigtails bouncing whenever she moved.
How pigtails give me hope. How they resist the pull of gravity.
A TINKLE IS THE SOUND OF TWO THINGS MEETING BUT FAILING TO MERGE
No. 1
The girl was born with the head of a boy growing out of her right shoulder. As she reached adolescence, when she showered or changed her clothes, the eyes of the boy would look down at her growing womanliness with desire and sadness. He desired to touch what he saw, but they weren’t his hands to which he was attached. Or if they were his hands then so too were they his breasts, his triangular tuft of hair, and his loose skin between the legs he could sometimes catch a glimpse of in the mirror. Maybe the other head was the intruder.
Eventually the girl took to touching herself, and the boy felt nothing through the hands, nothing from between the legs, and he knew for sure none of it was his. The girl, sensing his sadness, or growing tired of her fingers and hoping to experience the coupling she heard the single-headed girls talk about, decided to act. She went to the garage and took an old wood saw from the pegboard. She sawed away at the base of the boy’s neck. There was no pain, except once when she cut too close and nicked her shoulder.
A small flap of skin remained connecting them, but it couldn’t bear the weight of the boy’s head, which tottered, ripped off, and fell to the concrete floor. The boy winced at the impact, but was grateful to settle at such an angle that he could look up at the girl and admire the even shape of her shoulders.
No. 2
The husband sat on the couch every day, and at night he fell asleep there. He ate his meals from the coffee table, and though he must have gone to the bathroom on occasion, his wife never saw him rise from the cushions. Always in the background the television cackled, and he stared at the screen without ever focusing on the pictures. The husband grew heavier from eating bad food and never moving. With each day he sank deeper into the cushions until the wife said she could no longer tell him apart from the couch, or the couch from him, for the essence of each had seeped into the other. Where once rested the couch and on the couch rested the husband, there was now a blob of unidentifiable material, neither man nor couch, but at once vaguely mannish and couch-like.
The wife hosted a cocktail party one evening. The guests could locate only limited seating, unable to discern the couch from its occupant, and when the husband greeted them, they did not know the source of his voice.
>
“What was that?”
“That’s just my husband.”
“But where is he?”
“He’s there on the couch.”
“What couch?”
“Bah,” said the husband, and he stood up.
The guests gasped. To them, he had suddenly appeared out of ambiguity into concrete form, and behind him the couch had similarly emerged.
The wife turned around to find she could no longer recognize her husband or the couch and perceived only empty space where they had been.
No. 3
They clinked the wine glasses together. Then again. They clinked harder and harder until they finally clinked so hard the glasses shattered. With new glasses they repeated the process. Again the glasses shattered and the cascading shards embedded in the flesh of their hands. Blood dripped onto the starched white tablecloth and blended with spilt Merlot. They tried all night, went through dozens of glasses, but no matter how hard and earnest their toast, the glasses cracked. They were left with topless stems held in the tips of their pallid, red-streaked fingers.
“To the future,” they said, thinking of a future where the two glasses were one, sipped at from opposite sides by each of them. The distinct properties of the individual glasses would give way to a unified whole, the original components forgotten. Pushed together like two lumps of clay, leaving only a larger lump identified without reference to any preceding lumps or other subdivisions, down to the molecular, to the subatomic. But first, a toast.
Again the glasses shattered, and, giving up, the couple turned to their entrées, which were long since cold and covered with glass.
No. 4
“I painted these paintings for you.”
“I don’t like them.”
No. 5
When he retired the old man built a boat. He went to the forest and cut down the trees for the wood. He shaped the trees into planks and beams. He nailed and bound and glued them. Once the shape of the hull was formed he sealed it and painted it white. Along the top he painted a red stripe. He removed the branches and smoothed the trunk of the thickest tree. He mounted it in the middle and secured to it a white sail that would seem to glow in the sunlight. He mounted the rudder from brass fittings. He carved oars in case the wind wasn’t blowing.