“Trapped”
Short story
Trapped. Trapped. She couldn't escape the word and now that it had started circulating in her mind it was gaining momentum and power with each orbit, adding to the already immense gravity of the central issue.
The caveats to this conclusion were slowly but consistently being pushed aside. Life had been exciting. Very exciting! And in a good way, not in a vapid way. Back before this comfortableness. This creeping normalcy that threatened to consume her identity completely. Turn her into something else. Something she definitely was not. Something she shouldn't be!
The long walks helped. At their apex there was almost enough distance to achieve a clarity of mind – a separation from the issue of the day that always obscured the heart of the unease – before she yo-yo'd back home and the fresh air, as always, began to grow stagnant and, potentially, poisonous.
When Charley ran out of sight that peace collapsed almost entirely. This rarely happened, but last time he had been out of sight this long, after she had unhooked his leash so he could charge ahead and back again, over and over, at his own manic pace, help had to be called before she could find him. Which meant an argument about letting him off leash in the first place. Which became an argument, carte blanche.
It was less than a minute before she started to sweat, jogging in heavy boots, her body having to ramp up from zero to "oh no oh no oh no," so quickly. She knew Charley too well. He had a privileged upbringing, almost always within barking distance of backup from, as far as he was concerned, the world's current and reigning apex predator. Squirrel, great dane, 9-point buck – he could take 'em, probably.
She had only spiraled a short jaunt into distress when she spotted him, wild and oblivious, growling at a boulder. Of course. Rock is suspicious. Rock must be watched carefully. Make sure rock knows it's being effectively herded with a few dominant growls and hops. Good, partner is here. See how I have this rock cornered! I did that, see. Okay I'll stand down a bit, you can get in there too. Hey! Careful. Don't let rock get too comfortable.
Whatever brought Charlie here had delivered his attention to the entrance of a split in the stone that disappeared back, like a miniature canyon into the face of the mountain. Extending all the way to the top of the boulder, which buried deep into the Earth, the fissure allowed light to spill down, revealing ancient history and modern influence, all at once. Stratification in the stone showed its age and how the outer edges had weathered the outside influences all on their own, protecting the ledger contained deeper in the crack, until one day, as always: people. At shoulder height it was obvious where the rock had smoothed, not by wind or water, but by passage from some oily, furless creatures with a tendency to touch things for no reason.
The combination of fear, chase, and discovery was euphoric. Her mind, for these precious moments, was completely immersed in the present, a glorious release from the omnipresent itch of anxiety. Before she knew it she was angling sideways. There was easily enough room at the entrance to skirt through without really touching the walls, but her hands were out to the sides anyway, gently working their way across the wall in front of her, following the smoothness of her predecessors. When she got to the first bend that would hide her from Charley's guard position outside the crack, he followed, unhappily.
She kept imagining that at some moment there would be a point of no return. A tight, perhaps irreversible squeeze. She would discover her curiosity had trapped her. Charley would have to channel Lassie, run back, go for help. If it got to that point they were both probably screwed. Charley could get lost on a sidewalk.
But the moment never came. In fact, after the initial curves, the passage widened. Between that and the clearly beaten dirt, she was now more cautious about running into Lester Ballard (thank you, book club, for inserting ostracized cave murderers as a potential possibility) than getting stuck. Fucking book club. If you told your fourteen-year-old self you'd be in a fucking book club, what the fuck. Now the inexplicable algorithm of consciousness was firing off, smashing thoughts together like a particle accelerator, this minor exploration gaining density and weight. As the fissure slowly closed at the top and grew wider at the bottom, creating a tunnel that grew increasingly dark, she pressed on as if she was blowing on the embers of her long diminished soul, willing them back to life with each step into the shadows.
I'm such an idiot. I'm such a fucking child, she thought, as she reached the end of the conclusion of her grand adventure, a cave, still dimly lit by the light from outside, the dirt and dust failing to hide the evidence. Frito bags. Cigarette butts. Beer cans smashed into inconsistent incubators for ants. Yeah, I walked less than two hours from my house and thought I'd discovered a cave system that hadn't been used by teenagers to smoke weed. A real Christopher Columbus over here. Ugh, I really need to learn some other explorers, that's gross, I'm Mexican, for fucks sake.
Charley, who only ever knew two emotions, had switched over to excitement, and was happily exploring both dirt and trash with equal enthusiasm, until he found the backpack. Bless his heart, he knew better than to rip into the still sealed bags of chips inside, but just barely. So he stared at them, willing his partner's attention towards the bags and keeping watchful vigil, should they somehow, by one of the many unknown forces that governed his world, spring open on their own.
Leaving snacks in a backpack for later in an area with wildlife seemed both too dumb and too smart for teenagers whose best smoke spot was at least an hour walk from the nearest high school. But she was still an explorer, and, determined to leave no trace, would not pull them open for Charley. Plus when he eats human food there's often a complicated clean up process that follows some hours later.
The strangeness was deeply compounded when she realized that, beneath the sharpie marks and scratches, there was something unfamiliar across the walls. Handprints. Or rather, the evidence that a hand once was there, a long time ago. Faded and inconsistent, but still visible once her eyes adjusted, the walls were frequently marked by circles of some sort of pigment, diffuse around the edges, more opaque towards the center of each mark, where there were sharper lines as the application of the color was blocked, presumably by the presence of a hand.
She pulled out her phone and threw more light against the walls. At the touch of her light, the marks seemed to grow brighter even than the more recent additions from the backpack kids. It seemed like there were no brushstrokes, or even lines. In fact the circles seemed to include the suggestion of a wrist and everything faded off gently at the edges. Like a hot breath on cold glass.
Her light slowly circled the space. The hands ranged in size, but they were all adult, best she could tell. And that they were, on average, probably shorter than she was. How cool was that! She could tell something about some ancient people by looking at their handprints in a cave teenagers use to smoke weed out of USB-charged vape pens. Someone, who knows how long ago, had made an actual mark on the world that was reaching out, bending the fabric of time, and impacting a life who knows how far in the future.
Near the backpack, towards the furthest, darkest corner of the cave, one of the circles absolutely shined in response to her light. The orange and red gradient was profuse and proud, a beacon standing above the other marks, modern or otherwise. It was just above the height of her shoulders, which meant she could get right up close to it with her light. Her eyes, despite an absolutely empty mental file where "ancient cave art creation techniques" would be, wanted to know what made this one different.
She was overcome by the urge to understand and, in service to that urge, to touch the stain. This was followed immediately by the warring impulse to preserve. Perhaps the middle.
Almost as soon as she had the thought she found her index finger delivering information to her brain as it made contact. Slightly cool. Dry. Absolutely solid. Definitely a rock. The scientific method prevails.
The negative space and the hand that had created it were bigger than hers, so it felt safe to extend her hand to the wall, carefully, making sure her fingers spread just so, avoiding the precious outline. Her shoulder and elbow straightened, closing the distance between her palm and the wall and suddenly every sense available to her mind exploded with new information.
After a moment of stupefaction, her brain managed to shove the sensory signals into some sort of queue for processing.
The wall was colder. Much colder. The air was too. This correlated with the goosebumps rising on her skin and even the sudden whistling of a fierce wind, now howling through the rock behind her. Her hand jerked from the wall and she whirled around. The light was completely different. It was much brighter, easier to see, and the warm hue of summer sunlight was gone. Charley was gone.
Action and intellect were happening simultaneously. She ran to the wall and slammed her hand back into position, less careful. There was no dramatic reversal.
"Charley!"
Her voice was swallowed by the wind. She began to back towards entrance of the cave, finally noting, distantly, that the backpack was gone. The trash was gone. The scribbles were gone. She stopped as she suddenly registered the deep color of the handprints all around her. No longer faded by age – they felt fresh and demanding. The entrance was absolutely covered, overlapping with marks from the ground to the very top edge, twice her height, reaching towards the crack as if the hands were splitting the stone themselves, holding it open. It felt immensely dangerous.
The light filtering through the tunnel flickered. She froze and her breathing slowed, an ancient survival instinct shoving it's way to the front of her mind. The light changed again. She backed up, slowly. Maybe it was Charley, but something extrasensory made her feel otherwise. She backed up further, crouching into the shadows at the far end of the cave, as something approached.
A shape crossed the light at the opening, outlining a tall figure. Her eyes dialed in, distinguishing layers and fur, likely a human-shaped frame underneath. For some reason her brain pointed out for her that there were in fact, two arms, two legs, and a head. Something emerged from the mass and she flinched, but it was just an arm moving slowly. A hand emerged. Fingers. A gesture that could not be misunderstood.
Come.
"Goodnight"
Short story
I woke up 10 minutes later than I'd planned. There was a small pool of drool under my face that I tried to cover up as I stood, before realizing I was alone in the apartment. I walked groggily into the bathroom and looked at my face. My sleepy haze hadn't quite settled and my body felt like it was out of alignment with the image in the mirror. I splashed water on my face and got back to alignment. I walked to my closet to find that all of my shirts were dirty except for one, and my jeans were wadded up in the corner. I couldn't find my shoes.
Thirty minutes before I woke up later than I planned, she was holding the phone in front of her, dialing my number, and preparing a lie to tell me. She held the phone for a long time, her mind running through every possible outcome. There seemed to be more bad possibilities than good ones. Even the best outcome was tinged with bad, but that was no one's fault. Her roommate saw her holding the phone and knew instantly.
"Are you kidding me?" She said. "You're going."
We were sipping coffee in a small local coffee shop. I didn't know my way around except to and from the restaurant, so she had picked this coffee shop. She chose it over Starbucks. I think if everyone had a local coffee shop they would choose it over Starbucks. She was thinking about how she almost stood me up. For a moment she thought about telling me, and in that moment her mouth opened. Then it closed. Then she swallowed the thought. I asked her what she was going to say and she shook her head, smiling. She was trying to avoid saying things we are supposed to avoid saying, especially on first dates. Then she told me.
When I was driving to pick her up I tried to come up with a few things to say in case the conversation lagged. I could only come up with one question, to ask her what her major was. I had already asked her the night we met, but I had forgotten. I don't listen well when I'm nervous. I realized later that if we couldn't talk easily then I wasn't interested anyways. I never ended up asking what her major was.
When our dinner came to the table she was telling me about her ex-boyfriend. I had just finished telling her about my ex-girlfriend. I've been told you aren't supposed to talk about exes, but we did. It's very easy to get to know someone through a mutual dislike of something. We both disliked our exes. She talked less than I did, because someone had told her the same thing and she believed it. She believed that guys weren't interested in hearing about other guys. She's right, we don't. She wanted to hear about my ex though. She wanted to know what I liked, she wanted to compare. I had no interest in comparing.
At the reception shortly after we'd met I asked her a question. She got out the order of the processional and answered my question politely. A few minutes later when she walked by she smiled politely when she looked at me. Then she touched my arm as she passed by. I noticed, even though I think it meant nothing.
In the car on the way back to her house she placed her palm over my heart while I was driving. She joked that she couldn't find it. I laughed and said me neither. She said she was kidding and that she didn't think I was heartless, that I was just cold. I was cold because after my life changed I had mistaken coldness for strength. I didn't know I had done that, but I had. I was quiet for a moment because she had discovered something about myself that I didn't know, and because she had reached across to touch my chest.
She stopped kissing me for a moment and leaned away from my face. She looked at me, concerned. I asked her what she was thinking about and she thought for a moment before touching her heart, and then touching mine the same way she had in the car and holding it there. She said now she could feel it and she was worried. She was talking about her own heart. She said something vague that meant that she was trying to decide between protecting herself and living in the moment. Then she kissed me again.
I was salting my green beans when she told me something she thought was true. She told me that after a break-up men can shut down their emotions and move on until there isn't any hurt, and then turn the emotions back on. She told me no matter how hard women try to do this, they aren't capable. When they say so, they are trying to convince you, and trying to convince themselves. I thought about the girl I had been with before while she was telling me this, and how that girl had told me this lie over and over when I asked, before finally admitting she had been lying to me. It wasn't her fault, she really wanted it to be true and had tricked herself into thinking it was. When she told me this fact she had discovered about other people we both knew she was talking about herself.
I was being so honest I forgot to keep things to myself. I explained how I felt about things that were sure to end. I said that they were important, regardless of how much time we had to enjoy them. I said they were perfect because they started and ended without any fights or disagreements. While I said this she imagined a string of women before her. She was seeing me seeing myself as a conqueror, and herself as a conquest. She stopped listening, and stared at my coffee getting cold on the table. I didn't notice but continued talking until she started listening again. She heard me say I had to be genuinely affectionate towards someone. She heard me say I didn't care how much time we had because a bad situation shouldn't steal our chance at a moment. She heard me say that those moments were the things that I lived for. She kept listening.
I looked at the map on my computer, trying desperately to rehearse the way from the apartment to her house, from her house to the restaurant. I always got lost when I was in town, because I rarely had to drive. For this night I insisted on driving. I chose the only restaurant in town I could remember. It wasn't perfect, but I knew how to get there and I knew it was good enough and I wanted to plan everything for her.
She told me over coffee that she hadn't ever been on a real date before. She told me that she hated not knowing things ahead of time, and liked to plan. She told me that she liked that I had planned everything for her, and she didn't know why. Her friends had wondered what was going on when she told them she didn't know the plans for the night. They couldn't decide whether to be worried or excited. She couldn't decide either. I was excited.
I pretended to be offended by a joke she made on the couch in the coffee shop. She apologized, just in case I was actually offended. She put her hand on my knee and jokingly said she was sorry. All the other customers suddenly seemed to be leaving. We both looked up at them and thought we should leave. Before I said anything she invited me to her house. I asked her if her friends and the boy were still there. She said she didn't care. As we neared the house the others were leaving, we passed their cars on the street. Someone had burned something in the kitchen and the empty house smelled like burnt toast. I almost didn't notice because I was thinking about being in her house.
When we sat down on the floor of her room I saw her books and DVDs. I told her you can learn more about a person with 5 minutes in their room than with an hour of conversation. I'm still not sure if it's true, but I think it's an interesting thing to say to someone when you're in their room. She got up and went to the restroom and told me to look around then. She had good movies, but no great ones. She had books on leadership and math. The room was meticulously clean. After she sat down again I pointed out a loose string on the comforter. She got up and pulled scissors from a drawer to cut it.
Her head was lying on my chest in the middle of her bed. My right arm was around her small shoulders and my hand was playing with hers. I said something about how she had made it easy for me to kiss her. I had meant that she had been clear with me about whether or not I should try, and I was very grateful. She heard me say that she was easy. She sat up quickly and started to move away. I quickly grabbed her around the waist as if we'd been together for more than one night. I grabbed her with authority I didn't have. I pulled her back to me and she didn't fight. I moved in front of her and looked in her eyes and explained three times what I meant. Each time her anger faded a little more. I didn't kiss her again until she smiled at me.
In the morning as I was loading my bags in the car to go to the airport, I realized I had been smiling since I woke up. The only other time I've had this sensation was when I was drunk in Buenos Aires and couldn't tell if I was smiling or not without looking in the mirror.
She had her head on my chest, halfway upright so she could see the TV. The question on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" was obscure and we both chose different answers. I told her to make a bet. She thought while the man on the TV was thinking. She finally decided and quickly bet me that I had to come back to her city if I lost. I told her she had to visit me if she lost. We shook hands. She won and I smiled at her and I smiled at the future.
I looked at the clock and the time we had decided on had passed. I reluctantly let go of her waist and put my watch back on my arm, reentering reality from the dream I had been living. We didn't say much. There weren't any plans to make and no small talk about what came next. I kissed her forehead and stood up. I said goodnight instead of goodbye.
"Sight"
Excerpt from an ongoing story
"Kate?" said Eli after he'd entered her room.
She was on the far side, hands half raised, her fingertips against the now transparent wall. Beyond her a green sphere swirling with white hung in nothing. The nothing was punctured by a hundred thousand pinpricks of light, every single one brighter and heavier in Kate's mind than they had been before. Each slow breath clouded the wall and then faded long before the next. Eli could feel the wide dilation of her eyes.
"Excuse me," he said again.
It was another full breath before she responded quietly.
"Jaros showed me how to... how to change the wall. So I could see."
Eli walked up next to her, his awareness of the space outside growing with each step until it was larger in his mind than it had been in a long time. He tried to force himself to see it with terrestrial eyes. If you watched long enough you could barely notice the white spiraling in on itself as the clouds rolled above the planet.
"It looks less flat," she said quietly, mostly to herself.
"What does?"
"The stars. Behind the planet. On Earth it looks like a blanket someone rolled across the sky. But from here you can tell they're so far from each other."
They stood, letting their eyes touch the lights.
"That darker spot, through those two big clouds. That's where we're headed."
Her eyes flicked over to the spot but she said nothing.
"I'd like you to come with us when we leave the ship. We're meeting in the cargo bay in a few minutes."
She looked at him with the completely blank expression of someone who has diverted all their energy to a thought and forgotten their body. Then her mind returned and she gave him a nod accompanied by the suggestion of a smile.
"Okay."
"Tinkering"
Short story
Tinkering. The thought of the word made him sneer, even though there was no one around to hear it. Then he was immediately displeased with himself for the contemptuous feelings. He had never been a contemptuous man. Such is the effect of continuous failure.
By now the routine was automatic: Test. Encounter an inexplicable, unforeseen problem. Many sleepless nights later, solve the problem. Test. Encounter an inexplicable, unforeseen problem. Be ridiculed by peers. Repeat. But some men aren't deterred by failure. The insult spurs greater determination.
He was the only one who was still attached to the research. After a moment of excitement, his peers had disregarded the event as a fluke. He knew it was more than a fluke. It was a clue. It was his clue -- when the particle accelerator in Geneva registered, just for a fraction of a millisecond, a few peculiar atoms. Atoms that were too old. Atoms that, he hypothesized, had to have come from the future.
But the collider spit out strange readings all the time. The data was incredibly hard to interpret, often misleading, and usually irrelevant. It had yet to turn out anything other than high minded theories. But these peculiar atoms confirmed what he believed to be the ultimate purpose of the machine. Confirmed that at the very least, his hypothesis might be possible.
That was ten years ago. Time and effort had taken its toll, not just on his mind but on his body. He had begun to wither. It was as if in order to continue powering the incredible mechanisms of his brain he was draining every muscle, every fiber from the rest of his body and devoting it to discovery of solutions. It was a race, to see if he contained enough energy within him to solve the problem, or if he would instead expire prematurely.
He opened the door to the lab, following his meticulous routine. The light switches in the same order. The computer. A quick survey of the cabinet of supplies. Erase the white board. Start over from scratch, from the first equation. It was the only way to find new solutions and to make sure everything would be perfect. Do it over and over.
That was part of the challenge of time travel. It isn't like inventing flight, there's no way to do a safe test on soft ground. When you are pushing an object through time there is no soft ground. Tonight the object was an acorn he'd picked up on his walk from his neglected apartment just outside the campus. Of course it was smarter to test on a more simple, more pure object, but he would eventually have to test it on something organic, why not tonight? He wasn't expecting much from tonight's test anyway. He'd been dissecting the same problem for months, and was at the point where he was attempting almost random solutions to the math.
The test chamber was 5 feet in both dimensions. Outside the plexiglass, on all 6 sides, were large flat grey plates. When he turned on the machine they appeared to do nothing. No hum, no light, nothing. But what they did do was send invisible particles to the center point of the test chamber in whatever interval, strength, or frequency he programmed into the computer. The most common result was nothing. The least common, most exciting, and equally useless result was when the object, usually a steel ball bearing, melted.
After about two and a half hours, down from the four it used to take him to redo his equations, he was back at his latest problem. Nothing discovered on the way there. He plugged in the number he'd been thinking about -- half superstition, half educated guess -- and started the process. The computer’s processor and heat fans whirred to life audibly, but the rest of the machines in the room stood silent. He pulled the acorn from his pocket as he walked across to the test chamber. The rough texture was alien to his fingertips, which were used to the smoothness of a ball bearing. He clicked open the small metal safety latch, opened the side panel, and placed the acorn in the sling. The sling was hanging from the top of the enclosure and ensured that the test object was in the direct center of the panels. He secured the latch, donned his entirely unnecessary safety goggles, returned to the computer and initiated the machine.
The acorn was no longer in the sling. He blinked several times to confirm what he thought he saw. The enclosure looked exactly as it did before he placed the acorn inside. There was no smoke -- or any indication the machine had been activated. He confirmed that the program had shut down before walking slowly, cautiously, towards the test chamber. A few paces away he stopped and leaned forward, looking for some indication of what had happened. Still no acorn. Still no indication. He moved closer still, and after a moment of silent trepidation, opened the test chamber. Almost begrudgingly he touched the sling where the acorn was and then sharply pulled his hand back, chastising and then forgiving himself for checking for an invisible acorn. Out of habit he closed and locked the chamber and went back to the computer, sat down, and pulled up the data recorded by the instruments housed behind each panel. They recorded everything: infrared light, temperature, vibration, etc. Looking through the figures was disheartening and exciting at the same time. Every sensor that could detect an acorn, detected an acorn -- all the way up until the moment when he had initialized the machine. And then they detected nothing. No ramp down of signals or indication of energy. The data confirmed exactly what he had seen with his own eyes and nothing more. One moment there was an acorn. The next moment there was not.
His will suddenly broke. He walked quickly over to the test chamber, placed the dry erase marker from his pocket in the sling and then immediately walked back to the computer and initialized without thinking.
Nothing. The dry erase marker was unaffected, at least to his casual observation. With safety and protocol pushed to the back of his mind, he pulled the marker from the chamber and held it up for inspection. No change. He tossed it aside. It was the exact same settings. Why a different result? The machine didn't recharge, it had uniformpower output every time.
He ran outside, becoming increasingly frantic as his subconscious registered the proximity of a solution. He scooped up a handful of acorns and pine needles, not realizing that he had locked himself out. After a half hour outside, waiting for night security to come unlock the doors, he was admitted back into his lab still clutching his handful of acorns and pine needles like precious jewels. He reached in and careful piled his stash into the center of the sling, filling it. As he walked back an acorn or two fell to the bottom of the chamber. Uncaring, he initialized the machine, staring intently across the room. He held his eyes wide to avoid blinking. He gasped out loud as the handful disappeared. The data read the same. Things in the chamber, then nothing. Where did it go? There was no sign that it was destroyed... It simply wasn't there. Where did it go where did it go where did it go? How could he find out? He knew two new things: organic things disappeared, no matter where they were in the box. But a camera isn’t organic. Sensors aren’t organic. He wouldn't be able to send anything through that could actually transmit data back from… He hadn't the slightest idea where from.
He removed his lab coat and glasses, then pausing, put them back on and buttoned the jacket to the top button. He rolled his eyes at the mock safety of his jacket and plastic glasses as he opened the hatch and crawled in between the plates. He worked himself around, pulling his legs across him, before realizing that he couldn't start the program from the test chamber. He crawled out, spilling on to the floor and then walking quickly to the computer. Pushing all of his doubts to the back of his mind he set the timer on the program. One minute. Glancing at his watch quickly, he hit enter.
Quickly, back across the room, crawl in. Pause. Lock the hatch? Yes, lock the hatch. Never mind, it can't be locked from the inside and if the purpose of the hatch is to protect the scientist who is outside of the chamber… How much time left? Forty seconds. Longer than he thought. Purpose of the experiment? To find out where the things were going. Where could they be going? Anywhere, he supposed, any answer he thought up would be a complete guess. Better not to think about it, just see for yourself... What if he couldn't see, wherever he was going? What if it was dark? He didn't have a flashlight, or his cellphone, which was sitting on the counter next to the computer. Fifteen seconds. He had not thought this through. No, he didn't care. This was the answer, this was more than ten years of searching, testing, and failing. Now a final answer. A solution. No -- this was incredibly foolish, why not share this information first, test more, gather more data somehow before risking…
His brain, exercised over the years at the expense of his body, was incredibly clever, or he would have not been able to process what he saw.
It registered the intense heat of the unfiltered sun, the swirl of dust and gas that just had to be the gestation of a young Earth, and a handful of acorns and pine needles before he uttered a silent and final cry of joy.