Balance of Fragile Things

by Olivia Chadha

  Vic watched Oma, Isabella, and Papaji scurry toward the theater under the cover of umbrellas. Isabella told her family where to sit so she would know where to look for them in the audience. Maija and Paul shared the last remaining umbrella, while Vic insisted he didn’t need the protection from a little water.

  With the darkening afternoon light and unending rain, the structure looked like a watermark, translucently blue against an ever-deepening navy sky. Vic had never been here after the hours required of him. High schools weren’t supposed to be populated after classes were out, he thought. The school, usually dominated by rules and watchful eyes, was now just a space being filled by eager audience members.

  Vic felt odd in his clothes, like a stevedore stuffed into an older brother’s nice clothes. It was the blue-and-white bandana around his hair that gave him a seafaring façade. The gift that his father had given him, so much more than the kirpan itself, added to his swagger.

  “Hi, Vic.”

  He turned to see Katie, standing under an umbrella, smiling at him, and he felt his heart leap. “Hey, Katie,” he said, trying to sound casual. He stepped toward her.

  “I have your coupon. For the photo contest.”

  Vic had nearly forgotten about the contest. It was strange, he thought, how something like a photo had once seemed so important. “Oh, right. Thanks.”

  “Your photograph was definitely the best,” Katie said. “But then, I have a thing for butterflies.”

  He remembered the butterfly on her notebook. “Really?”

  She nodded, then grinned. “You might even call me Butterfly Girl.”

  Butterfly Girl—he let the word sift through his brain for a moment. “You’re BF Girl? From my blog?”

  She nodded again. “It’s a great blog, Vic. I hope you plan to keep writing it. Anyway, here’s your coupon.”

  She held out an envelope, and he took it, watching raindrops dampen the envelope. Their fingers touched, briefly.

  “E-mail me,” she said, then took off toward the theater.

  “Pretty girl,” he heard his mother murmur, and when he looked at her he caught her smiling her approval.

  As they continued along the sidewalk into the school, Vic heard a raspy voice coming from the side of the building. When he turned the corner, he came face to face with Joe Balestrieri and his black eyes. Vic kept walking, leading his family to the high school’s entrance. As he was about to collide with Joe, Joe got out of his way.

  “You know, bantam weight fighters are even more feared because of their speed.” Paul beamed.

  Vic understood his father’s comment. For a split second, he considered telling him how he’d punched Joe, not once but twice. But he realized he didn’t need to. His father was proud of who he was, as he was, completely.

  Isabella

  The theater was a warm, velvet-lined womb, and Isabella let the room take her in. The scaffolding along the wall and ceiling above the orchestra area was heavy with lights, speakers, and props. Backstage was buzzing with excitement. Stagehands hurried to touch up the set, while actors paced and nervously recited their lines. Isabella peered through a gap in the curtain and watched her father and brother take the aisle seats beside the other family members in the back of the theater. Most seats were full; she was surprised.

  The air tingled, and Isabella felt a chill run across her body. She thought of Michelle, and—as the cast gathered among the fake cardboard forest, folding chairs, and holiday props backstage—she silently dedicated her performance to her friend.

  Isabella held her wrinkled copy of the script in her sweaty hands and read her lines over and over again. Her brain felt empty. Tewks, who was dressed head to toe in black, with a beret covering his head, took her script away.

  “You know it. Just relax.” He smiled.

  “Break a leg,” Tracy snarled. Her skin was pale yellow. Isabella was surprised that Tewks had let Tracy continue in the play, as she’d missed so many rehearsals that he’d shortened her role even more, which meant she was now only in one scene. But it was just like Tracy not to miss out.

  Erik said nothing but squeezed her hand.

  “Okay, people. Tonight we do as we’ve been doing every week in rehearsal. Remember, I’ll be onstage just out of sight in case anyone forgets a line. I am so proud of each and every one of you. Everybody knows their job, so let’s go out there and show them how it’s done.” Tewks wiped his damp forehead with the back of his hand, then clapped his hands together. “Places, everyone.”

  Isabella looked at the set. It was better than she’d imagined it would be. The detailed decorations made the Oval Office come to life, from the busts of former presidents and an enormous American flag to paintings in gold frames and red curtains. The audience’s voices quieted to whispers. The lights dimmed, then total darkness blanketed the room. Tewks gave her a little push, and she rushed out to her mark on a stool. The curtain slid slowly open. In a few moments, a spotlight illuminated her and her shiny black shoes. She felt the yellow light in the darkness funnel the audience’s vision; it was reminiscent of falling, she onto them, they onto her, like moths drawn to a light.

  “There is a certain silence that settles in before a firestorm. Waiting for the inevitable, and knowing the size of the explosives the enemy has, freezes the air molecules into place. Your ears ring, heart throbs, as you wait for the wailing cry of the airplane.”

  She was poised, serious, and eloquent. A student sitting in the scaffolding pressed a button on the sound system. First came a rumble evocative of an earthquake, a metallic wail, and then an airplane engine seemed to roar from one side of the theater to the other. The light on Isabella dimmed, she stood, and a figure dressed in black removed the stool and ducked off the stage. She ran to her next mark and hoped Erik moved to his. Spotlights lit the entire stage, and the audience gasped. In the background was an enormous window with a digital image of two mushroom clouds projected on the horizon; fire conflagrated in the foreground. In the Oval Office, it looked as if gravity had been turned off and on again: All the furniture was upside down, papers were charred, and books were scattered across the floor. Erik, dressed in a suit that had seen better days, stood off to the side, and Isabella sat on the floor shaking.

  “I should have acted faster,” Erik said. “After the first bombs dropped, it was my responsibility.”

  “Mr. Vice President, we need to get underground, please. There is no doubt that the next bomb will come soon.”

  “They’re all gone. They killed our families. I should have pushed your father to nuke them first.”

  “The President was stubborn. You’re still here, and it’s your responsibility to stay alive.”

  The play continued through three acts, and Isabella felt herself becoming absorbed into the role, until she felt as if she inhabited the character of Samantha completely. And then came the final scene, when Samantha and the Vice President emerged from the bomb shelter and saw the sun for the first time. And when the last line was spoken, Isabella felt a weight lift from her shoulders. She turned toward the lights and bowed, and she felt the applause surround her, escalating, until the very floor beneath her began to shake. And then she realized that it was shaking. Everything was shaking.

  And suddenly, there was an enormous cracking sound, like a tree trunk splitting in half. The sound-effects student shrugged at Tewks, who was frantically looking around the stage. Isabella searched for the source of the noise, and she saw that Erik looked just as startled as she was. The noise grew in volume; then they heard a woman in the audience scream.

  Tewks manually switched on the lights in the theater and illuminated the cause of the sound. The red-carpeted aisle that divided the theater into two seating areas had fractured like a fault line and exposed a deep hole. Huge pieces of concrete, red carpet, and wood had already plummeted into the expanding abyss.

  The stage shook beneath Isabella’s feet, and she and Erik got separated in the chaos. She froze, paralyzed by the magnitude
of the scene, and watched for a few seconds as mayhem ensued; people ran frantically toward the exits all at once. Some fell. She saw a few people get trampled by the panicking crowd.

  Isabella watched as the fissure expanded and water spewed from the chasm. Soon some were knee deep in water. She saw her parents in the back of the theater, waving for her to follow them. Oma and Papaji must’ve already made it out.

  She headed toward them, but her path was blocked by the swaying scaffolding that was dangling from the ceiling. She saw Vic push past their parents and begin to maneuver his way over the seats toward the stage. The ellipsoidal lights short-circuited and flashed different colored lights until they showered the entire scene in throbbing red. Sirens wailed from the PA system. Isabella made her way to the front of the stage and looked for the best way down. There were still many people in the front, climbing over the seats, trying to get out. She saw Mr. and Mrs. Finch making their way through the crowd from the first row. The ground shook again, and Isabella gasped as the red lights fell from their support onto Mrs. Finch. Isabella watched, stunned, as Mrs. Finch fell to the water-covered linoleum, her floral dress flailing wildly, the water rising around her. The red luminescence made the water look like blood, and Eleanora’s body was now motionless.

  Vic reached the stage, helped Isabella onto stable ground, and signaled to their parents to get outside. A few minutes later, the entire Singh family was huddled in the Cutlass Supreme. Isabella looked out the window and saw Erik jump into Tewks’s van with some of the other actors.

  Her mother backed out of the parking spot. As she drove over the slick asphalt, Isabella turned around just in time to see the sinkhole swallow the entire theater and part of Cobalt High. Water splashed up like a great whale’s blowhole and drenched the already sopping campus. Her mother continued down Main Street, maneuvering around signs that blocked off parts of the town from street traffic. She turned onto Peregrine Court, and when they approached The Commons, she pulled over. Brown water was rushing up to the front windows of their house.

  “Maija, the water’s coming,” Paul said. “The river is breached. We need to get to higher ground!”

  Oma closed her eyes.

  Her mother drove up the back roads that zigzagged through a hemlock forest in an old part of Cobalt. When they reached the top of the mud-covered hill that overlooked the entire area, she put the car in park. Though it was raining, Isabella rolled down the window, and they all looked down at Cobalt in awe. If it wasn’t for the devastation caused by the flood, the homes now submerged, it would have been beautiful. The trees were the only obstinate survivors of the cataclysm; their saturated, naked limbs interrupted the singular plane of gray sky and water. The PMI campus, most of Main Street, and even the lower portion of the Heights had been softened by the deluge. Manmade edges of concrete and steel were no challenge for the water.

  “Everything’s lost now.” Oma dabbed tears with the back of her hand.

  “Not everything.” Isabella drew the Star of David necklace from inside her shirt and showed it to Oma. “I borrowed it. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Darlink.” Oma placed her hand on Isabella’s.

  “Where are we going, Mama?” Vic asked.

  “I don’t know, dear. I don’t know.” Her mother’s voice shook. “There are supplies in the trunk. We can last for at least a day or so in the car.”

  Oma sniffed. Papaji held her hand.

  Isabella and Vic watched the horizon as Cobalt disappeared behind the last hill.

  Paul looked at his family. “I am tired of the rain.”

  Maija drove on.

  On The Wing

  Extinction

  Posted on November 14

  I found a sad little picture of a dried Xerces Blue corpse online, and beside it was a photo of the fat French entomologist Boisduval. He supposedly “discovered” the Xerces Blue, though I imagine it existed long before the robust man found it. (I think someone sent him the specimen, but I’d rather imagine history with him discovering it in the wild.) Boisduval was dressed in a long coat and shirtsleeves, typical of mid-nineteenth-century attire. He looked proud and confident as he leaned unnaturally against an oversized leather wingback, as though he were Napoleon.

  Let me paint the picture for you: a fat French man trampling through the coastal lupine with a net chasing a butterfly no larger than an inch across. The butterfly coasts low above the ground looking for nectar or a salt puddle. He catches it, admires it, impales it with a pin, and declares it a relative Persian king of long ago, naturally. In reality it probably went like this: a fat French man opens a package with said dead butterfly inside, impales it on a pin, and declares it Xerces. Did he see himself in the butterfly and want to draw a connection between his own lineage and the name Xerces? Perhaps he just wanted to lengthen his own name: Jean Baptiste Alphonse Dechauffour de Boisduval. To him, it probably would have been folly to name a discovery after anything less than a crown, and Monarch was already taken.

  I learned about the Xerces Blue’s last flight recently. It was last seen on San Francisco’s Presidio in 1941. I wonder if W. H. Lange, the last recorded person to see the Xerces Blue almost one hundred years after Boisduval’s “discovery,” knew he was witnessing its last flight. Perhaps he caught the last lonely butterfly, the omega Xerces, as it searched for companions that no longer existed. His habitat was gone, no eggs were laid, and that was that. The more construction in San Francisco encroached upon the Xerces’ land, the fewer flowers were available to drink, and the fewer eggs it laid for the next season. The Xerces Blue was unique in that it was a sub-species that only lived in that one small location; studying it would have offered some insights into evolutionary theory.

  I see ghosts all around me. From our escape from Cobalt to our drive south to Florida, to my family’s new home, I see them. They crowd me. There in Cobalt it was the Singh Blue and the endangered Karner. Here in Florida, it’s the Miami Blue that’s vulnerable, and the Schaus’ Swallowtail is nearing extinction. In the history of the planet Earth, scientists have identified five mass extinctions. These vast annihilations of species have killed around ninety percent of all living creatures on the planet. Some extinction is natural, or caused by a massive cataclysmic event like a meteor. However, hunting a species to death (buffalo, Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing, gray wolf, etc.) or destroying habitats through slash-and-burn agriculture is not natural. The rate of our CO2 emissions has altered the planet’s atmosphere. Climate change is natural, yes. Our acceleration of a natural process is not. Some scientists believe that we are upon our sixth extinction. I don’t know about this. That no one will ever see another Xerces Blue drinking nectar from the lupine is a loss for us all. All I know is what I see. And what I see are ghosts.

  Glossary

  achchhá (Punjabi): good or excellent, used when one is in agreement

  ad sach (Punjabi): roughly translated as truth/God was true in the beginning

  ajuni (Punjabi): roughly translated as beyond the cycle of birth and death

  akal murat (Punjabi): roughly translated as the truth is a shapeless form

  anddá (Punjabi): egg

  ārprāts (Latvian): mad, insane, or crazy

  bachchá (Punjabi): male child

  bháí (Punjabi): brother

  bháíjis (Punjabi): Sikh preacher or holy person

  bahut kharáb (Punjabi): very bad

  badmásh (Punjabi): evildoer

  chaliá/chalo (Punjabi): to go, go on, let’s go

  daal (Punjabi): lentils

  dacoit (Punjabi): a member of an armed band of robbers in India

  dátrí (Punjabi): handheld sickle

  dhí (Punjabi): daughter

  dūre (Latvian): fist

  ēzelis (Latvian): donkey

  fiftee (Punjabi): the first layer of cotton wrapped around the head under a turban

  frikadelu zupa (Latvian): dill and meatball soup

  goonda (Punjabi): a gangster or individual involved in
corruption

  gurdwárá (Punjabi): a Sikh temple

  gur prasad (Punjabi): roughly translated as his grace extends to all his creations

  hánji (Punjabi): yes or okay, with respect

  haveli (Punjabi): a private mansion in Northern India or Pakistan

  hai be sach (Punjabi): roughly translated as it is true today as well

  ik (Punjabi): one

  ik onkar (Punjabi): roughly translated as there is but one God

  ik mint (Punjabi): one minute

  Japji Sahib (Punjabi): Guru Nanak’s poem in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib that one recites usually in the morning

  jap (Punjabi): to recite or chant

  jhutá (Punjabi): liar

  ji (Punjabi): sign of respect, can be added to words and names

  jugad sach (Punjabi): roughly translated as was true in the primal age

  kaccha (Punjabi): one of the elements of the Khalsa, a loose-fitting undergarment like shorts or boxers

  kara (Punjabi): one of the elements of the Khalsa, a simple metal bracelet

  khanga (Punjabi): one of the elements of the Khalsa, a small wooden comb used and worn in one’s hair

  karta purakh (Punjabi): roughly translated as only the truth can give creation existence

  Khalsa (Punjabi): meaning pure, Khalsas are Sikhs who have undergone the sacred Amrit Ceremony initiated by the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh

  kesh (Punjabi): one of the elements of the Khalsa, the practice of not cutting one’s hair

  khichuri (Punjabi): a combination of lentils and rice

  ki halle (Punjabi): how are you?

  kirpan (Punjabi): one of the elements of the Khalsa, a ceremonial sword or knife

  kokle (Latvian): Latvian string instrument related to the zither

  kurta, kurta pajama (Punjabi): long and loose shirt that falls around the knees and pants worn by men and women in India