Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 21

by Kelly Link Gavin Grant

My mother's mouth moved and her face turned red. She stood up and tripped over the power supply cables which scavenged left-over kinetic energy from my sneakers.

  I felt the vibration of her voice in my teeth, even though I couldn't hear her.

  Later that day my dad helped me cart all my lab equipment downstairs. He said I had to work in the basement from then on.

  We set up my equipment in the east side of the basement. On the other side was the washing machine, and in the middle was a piece of orange carpet and a couch.

  My dad stood up, knees creaking. “Good luck with your machine."

  I continued on with the wires. Red to black. Black to red. Tum-ticka-tum. I could do this without duct tape.

  * * * *

  When I went upstairs to get some water my mother trapped me in a transition point. That's the thing about doorways, certain pathways, anything that helps you move from one place to another. Most people move through easily, don't even notice them. I get stuck in them, and my mother takes advantage of that.

  She stepped in front of me as I was trying to get from the living room into the kitchen. I tried to move but I was held tight by the transition force, a giant hand on my shoulder.

  She held up an orange bottle with typed words on the side. What poison had she concocted for me now?

  She twisted open the lid. Small white pills spilled into her hand.

  She smiled and held out her hand.

  They were such tiny pills. How could she think that anything so small could affect me in any way? It struck me as funny, and I began to laugh.

  My mother shoveled the pills back into the bottle, her lips pressed tight. Several dropped onto the floor, rolled this way and that. One rolled through the doorway and ended my paralysis. I followed the pill through the doorway.

  Dum. Dum. Dum. Another one bites the dust.

  My father sat in the living room reading a paper. My mother must have said something to him because he said, without looking up. “I won't make her take anything she doesn't want to."

  My mother bent to gather up the pills, hands shaking. One had escaped. It lay in the crack between where the kitchen tiles ended and the living room carpet began. It was stuck in a transition. I knew what that was like. I felt a sudden kinship with the little pill.

  I put my foot over it, pressed it further into the crack to keep it safe from my mother's enormous groping hands.

  "Do not be afraid, little one,” I whispered. I hummed softly to it. Hum. Hum. Hum.

  My mother walked away. Her back was very straight.

  I would come back later and rescue the pill. I had a moment of inspiration: the pill was vitally important for my machine.

  * * * *

  When I was young I could still hear my mother pretty well. One day when I was nine she lured me to the front of the house with the promise of a trip to the science museum.

  She stood by the front door in a suit. Green light from the stained-glass inset spilled around her like a sick halo.

  "Are you finally ready?” she said.

  She had only worn that suit once before to uncle Mark's wedding. She would never wear it to the museum.

  I would have run except that she had already trapped me in the transition point of the hallway. I sat down on the floor. I held my backpack over my head. I thought maybe all the metal in there would shield me.

  "Herb!"

  My dad came back in, carrying the car keys. He didn't look at me.

  "We're already late,” my mother said.

  He tried to lift me up by my arms. The backpack fell open, and all my lab supplies skittered here and there: antennae, transducer coils, power supplies.

  "Jesus Christ,” my mother said. “What is all that junk?"

  My dad squatted next to me and helped me gather the equipment.

  "Dr. Franklin won't wait forever,” my mother said. “Just leave it."

  "No!” I said.

  "I don't know what good Dr. Franklin is going to do anyway,” my father said.

  I hugged the transceivers to my chest.

  "Forget it,” my mother said. “Just forget it.” She slammed the front door on her way out.

  That's when I knew she would never understand me.

  * * * *

  Midnight. Alone in the basement. It was my habit to work late into the night, long after my parents had gone to sleep. That's when I did my best thinking, when the signals from the Gnostics got through loud and clear. Love is a battlefield.

  I kept thinking of that little pill upstairs, trapped in the gritty boundary between tile and carpet. Carpet fuzz to the west, unyielding tile to the east.

  I crept upstairs and with a plastic knife, freed the renegade pill from its prison. The basement door frame gave us a bit of a problem, but eventually the pill and I slid through sideways, my back scraping against the door jamb, and we made it back to my machine.

  The machine was almost ready.

  The metal had to be carefully arranged so that the magnetic field lines of the earth (albeit small) would coincide with the induced field lines of the metal. The current I got from a dead light bulb. Transitions are fuzzy; there is a little bit of death in life, and a bit of life in death.

  A special aluminum-tipped wedge served as a conduit, coaxing out the last bit of power from the bulb. Four spherical transceivers, a prism to cut and spread the energy of photons, a fine mesh to capture and distil the mystery that is God.

  Here's the key to the machine: God is in the transitions. God is the moment just passed. The instant you think you've put your finger on it, it has slipped into the past. God is the moment about to come. It is always just out of reach.

  I only had to capture a moment, hold it still for an instant.

  I washed the courageous pill with the light from the prism. I placed it first in the tray of the machine so that it would soak up the precisely aligned magnetic fields, and then into my mouth, where in four hours it would bring me face to face with God.

  * * * *

  I woke in the morning on the little strip of carpet next to the basement couch. Light shone through the dusty half-windows which looked out past the garbage cans onto the front lawn.

  My machine stood on an upside-down plastic folding chair. Twine wound through the legs, creating a see-through basket. Aluminum foil balls adorned the feet. A prism hung from a key chain attached to a dead light bulb.

  I stood and pushed the prism. As it swung, the colors of the rainbow washed over the litter on the floor: red sheaths of plastic from stripped wires, bolts and nuts and nails and screws. My equipment. My laboratory. My sad machine.

  "No,” I said. It no longer looked like a machine, like a key to anything.

  And the Gnostics—they had deserted me. I could hear morning jays calling to each other. I could hear a bus grinding the pavement outside, but I could not hear my music. My head was empty as a carved-out pumpkin.

  I ran to the stairs, up the stairs, to the doorway, through the doorway. I was strangely unhindered by transitions. Failure, failure. My machine had not worked.

  I went to the front door and opened it. Outside, dandelions sagged over the front stoop, dew clinging to their leaves. There was a bus stop directly in front of our walk. I remembered waiting there sometimes, holding my mother's hand. I remembered riding the bus downtown with her to the science museum, an hour away. I remembered my mother's bright blue cardigan and her singing softly to me in time with our steps up the wide cool steps of the museum, and the giant concrete lion out front.

  "You're up early."

  I turned. My mother stood behind me in a ratty bathrobe. Her hair was not in place.

  "Are you going out,” she said in a flat tone, not really a question. She moved away, as if she did not expect a reply. My mother was a stooped and graying woman. The years were written in liver spots on her arms, in the way her mouth turned down, afraid to smile. When had my mother become an old woman?

  I blinked, swiveled my head this way and that, trying to fi
nd my frequency. Where had my music gone?

  "Something's wrong with my head,” I said.

  My mother stopped. She turned and stared at me.

  I knew in that instant that I would never forget the way my mother looked that morning. Her slumped shoulders, her lined face, time pivoting around us like a top dancing on its point, slowing, taunting, primed to topple.

  And then, strangely, my mother began to cry.

  Nothing. Only a whisper, but it was there. The Gnostics! They were coming through. I tested the doorway, felt a hint of resistance. Relief flooded through me. Tik-tik. The faintest brush of beat, like a grasshopper's legs preparing for the night.

  "Have you talked to your father this morning?” my mother said. The last few words were so soft I could barely hear them. And then she said, “I thought—missed—but look."

  "I'm going back downstairs,” I said.

  My mother wiped her eyes. She might have said something else.

  Nothing's gonna change my world. I hurried through the hallway arch and through the basement door before the transition force could lay its clammy hands on me.

  Ticka-ticka-tik. By the time I reached my machine, the music gurgled through my veins once more.

  I surveyed the machine. The prism was at the wrong angle. The magnetic fields did not align.

  The Gnostics have taught me that inside each person is the spark of the divine, and that it is just as real as the soup of the physical universe in which we swim, live and die.

  But I think they are wrong. The divine spark is not inside or outside, but somewhere in between. God is not the attainment of knowledge, but the attempt at apprehension. God is in the cracks; God is everything we can't quite reach, everything we can't control. In the border between sanity and insanity. In every imagined story ending.

  I began to think: Maybe it was impossible to capture a transition, but every time we go through one a piece of God sticks to us like lint on a sweater.

  There are many maps to God.

  This is one of them.

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  The Blokes of Ball Point by Suzanne Baumann

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  Sanctuary by Carol Emshwiller

  Just like Russian thistle and starlings, they took over. And, like those, they paid no attention to us, just took over every empty plot of land or empty building ... parks ... forests....

  Just as with Russian thistle and starlings, we hardly noticed them at first. They do jump fast. You always think: Did I really see that or not? That long legged thing? Was it really there?

  I suppose they thought they were so fast, and us so slow, we wouldn't notice them at all—ever—or if we did we wouldn't care. They must have thought, that, after all, they would only live in spaces where we weren't, but there got to be a lot of them and we did start noticing.

  * * * *

  We don't know how they got here, but however it was, for sure they knew our habits. There are some broken clumps of metal at the tops of many of our lesser mountains so they knew us well enough to know the tallest mountains would be crowded with climbers, and they knew that hardly anybody wanted to climb the lesser ones.

  We figure they must have got in trouble back wherever they come from and looked for sanctuary here.

  They're fast and they can jump four or five times their height. Also they can lift many times their body weight. They must have counted on all those things to keep them safe and they must have thought, since they weren't doing any harm, and were staying out of our way, and were careful not to take anything we might be using, and didn't live in places we might want to live in ... they must have thought: Why would we care whether they were here or not?

  They don't mind being all packed in together. I saw that when I found a bunch of them in my old unused cistern that I'd had before the city water came out this far.

  The day my life changed for the better, I had taken my pipe and my six pack and a portable fan (global warming is even worse than last year) out to the front porch rocking chair. No sooner had I sat down than here was one of them (holding still for once), perched on the porch railing gesticulating and making whistling sounds.

  I'd never had such a good look at one till then. They're always leaping out of sight before you hardly grasp that they're there, but this one sat on the railing chirping at me. If I thought real hard I could almost think I heard real words.

  I'd read about them, and I thought I'd maybe seen some jump a couple of times. There were pictures in the paper, but mostly of them leaping away. This was my first good look. Their eyes are larger than is comfortable to look at—like small dogs'. Their thighs seem malformed, too. Overdeveloped. I guess they have to be to leap around so far and fast. Their ears are too big, too. Funny how, even with all these exaggerations, they look so much like us.

  I knew I couldn't catch it just like that, leaping out at it. I'd have to trick it. It was male. (Their idea of clothes is ludicrous. Wispy bits of scarf-things that don't hide anything important.)

  (On females those thick thighs makes them all the more sexy, even though their breasts are small. None of that is of any use to me though.)

  He chirped at me and waved his hand as if trying to make me understand something, but I didn't want to.

  I nodded and smiled and waved my hand in a similar way. He smiled and nodded back. (Their smiles are just like ours.) I motioned for him to follow me inside and led him to the far side of the living room. He followed. Gullible. On the way I picked one of my wife's African violets and held it out to him. Had he a buttonhole that would have been about the right size for it. Just when he reached to take it, I tipped the wastebasket upside down on him.

  I once caught a squirrel that way.

  Once you've got it, the trick is to slide something under the waste basket without lifting it up. I used a cookie sheet. I had my wife start boiling water—that was before we found out they taste a lot better fried. When the water was ready, I lifted the whole shebang and dropped the contents of the wastebasket in.

  The next day I found dozens of the creatures in my old cistern. It was leaking. The whole bottom was covered with about a foot of water. Maybe that's what that male wanted to tell me. The creatures were hanging from the walls as best they could. They didn't try to leap away. They looked as if they thought I'd help them and I did.

  The water was full of all sorts of debris: pieces of cloth, doll-sized pots and pans, doll-sized hats.... Most likely stolen from us and our kids. Or maybe taken from our dumps.

  I was one of the first in this area to realize their potential. Actually lots of potentials because after that I started selling see-through mesh wastebaskets as the best kind for trapping them. They're too smart for have-a-heart traps. Best to lure them into your house with flowers or some such. With my cistern, I let them out one by one straight into a cage. They've already had babies. I haven't tried any of the little ones. I don't know if they'd be economical anyway, being so small.

  (Isn't it lucky they came along just when global warming got really bad and most types of cows and sheep weren't doing so well?)

  I fixed the leak and lowered an old table in for them in case it happened again. I could see on their faces they were grateful. I smiled back at them and waved and then I nailed down the lid.

  We found out they taste better when, like snails, they're purged, so I feed them mostly on cornmeal. Besides, it's cheap.

  They don't scream when plopped into the grease. I think their voices, especially at a time like that, may be at higher frequencies than we can hear.

  Their legs are a little too big to be called frog's legs, but I market them as that. You'd have to be pretty stupid not to know
what they really are, though some people don't seem to, or don't want to admit they know.

  No matter how much they wave, gesticulate, shake their heads no, try to escape ... even so, by now lots of us are in this business.

  How smart can they be with heads the size of tangerines?

  Only thing that matches them in sweetness and tenderness is rocky mountain oysters.

  The Chinese prefer the eyes and they like finger bone soup. The French like the sweetbreads and brains.

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  Today's Writers Today

  Kirstin Allio's novel Garner (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award for First Fiction. She has recently been selected one of “5 Under 35” writers to watch (and hopefully read) by the National Book Foundation. She lives in Providence, RI with her husband and sons.

  Adam Ares enjoys staring at blank word processor documents, reading books in languages that he doesn't really understand, and Galaga. Perhaps, in the future, he will put adamares.com to some better use than he does now. Trained in yoga, baking and phlebotomy, Lauren Bartel lives in Minneapolis where she is currently involved with the newborn book publishing efforts of Whistling Shade Press, contributing to various food-related publications, and planting tomatoes.

  Suzanne Baumann has been making minicomics for over a dozen years and plans to make many more. She feels most at ease in places where there are lots of pens and scraps of paper lying around.

  Gwenda Bond is writing young adult novels while keeping her pets in line and her books close by.

  Matthew Cheney has published fiction and nonfiction in Rabid Transit, Locus, Pindeldyboz, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Rain Taxi, English Journal, and other venues of questionable taste. He is the series editor for Best American Fantasy. He teaches high school in New Jersey.

  Brian Conn grew up in a forest where it often rained on Christmas Eve. His work has also appeared in GUD and Sybil's Garage. He is an MFA student at Brown and a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. He lives in Providence, and the only thing that can make him laugh these days is Beckett.