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science fiction

4.

“For gosh sakes, David,” Gerry huffed, slouching at her kitchen table, “They’re killing me with this stuff.” Her friend, framed in a battered screen propped up against a stack of books, rolled his eyes, almost imperceptibly.

“C’mon,” he said. “It’s a big anniversary and they’re throwing you a bone.”

“Forty is a lot of nothing. Hell, I’d rather celebrate on the 42nd, which is at least funnier.”

“What do you have so far?”

“Six boxes of papers and a little museum of obsolete media. I’m not even sure if I can read half the data I’ve got here.”

“That’s just your source material. What do you have so far?”

“I’ve got nothing. I’m afraid to even start writing this stuff down. I feel like there’s nothing I didn’t cover in interviews twenty and thirty years ago, and I don’t want the attention,” said Gerry, as she extracted the tea ball from her mug and let it drip for a bit.

“We all know you’re going kicking and screaming, but it’s a good story, and it’s essentially been…how long is a generation, again?” David said.

“If you start measuring in generations, I’m hanging up on you,” Gerry snapped.

“Well, it’s at least one, and maybe two.”

“Oh, go away, David.”

“Love ya, darlin’.”

“You as well.” Gerry tapped the screen to close the connection, and just sat, quietly, for a moment, listening to the dog snoring on the sofa in the next room.

Two generations? Really? It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, or maybe it’s been longer.


© 2020 Joe Belknap Wall

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3.

The sun touched the far horizon and it was the start of the hazy season, of clouds pulled into beautiful ribbons of gold and orange against the deepest, bluest sky of the year, when the wind whipped the low trees nearly flat against the brush and the landscape sang in a soaring symphony as the hollow ends of the dried stalks of songweed started to harmonize in the onslaught. In the deep channels of the equatorial cities that rose in labyrinthine ceramic mounds from the deep woods, the people carried on, trudging from place to place wreathed in the soundtrack of the coming harvest season.

In the trees, tight seed heads like jagged crowns of hard, dark wood caught the wind, and wobbled in the turbulence until their outer layers peeled off in layer after layer to reveal tufts of fine grey fluff, each tied with a tracery of lavender veins to a tiny seed. One after another, the wind took the tufts aloft, and the sky over the forest was thick with clouds of seeds riding the north wind.

A potter worked at the well-worn wooden bench in the open atrium of her home, pausing to watch the surging flow of seeds overhead in the fading twilight with a perfect sensation of nonresistance that came to her when the clay was cooperating and her inner vision was clear and open. A bit of fluff, caught in an eddy, floated down and landed on the bench, its woolly tuft lit in the sparklight that hung over the bench. The potter carefully wiped herself clean of clay, picked up the seed, told it her truth, and blew it upward, back into the streaming exodus migration going on overhead.

© 2019 Joe Belknap Wall

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2.

Max was not a fan of swimming in the last part of the summer, but it was the thing to do. The spot where the high bank was interrupted by a gap and a steep slope, at the edge of a broad floodplain that had been farmed once, for its rich regular deposits of stirred-up soil from upstream, but this stretch had been abandoned thanks to protective zoning decades earlier, and the last sign of its last resident, an old yellow schoolbus from midway through the last century, had sunk into the soil down to its chassis, collapsed partly into itself like a rusty eggshell, and been buried under moss and a cap of brush growing in fifty years of settling dust.

Max and Alice cut a wide path around the bus, which had an ominous air about it and presence in local legend among the kids of Orleans Crossroads and nearby Great Cacapon on top of its actual infestation of bald-faced hornets building a massive paper globe in the frame where the windshield had been. They rolled their bikes to the edge of the cut, leaned them neatly against a tree, and carefully made their way down the slippery muddy cut to the river’s edge.

“I can’t believe the storm washed away my steps,” Max complained, pointing out how the slabs of stone he’d carefully placed two summers prior were all in a heap at the bottom of the slope.

“You can’t beat water,” Alice said, with a shrug.

The last heavy rains had brought the river all the way up to the top of the cut, and the tree branches below that level were full of leaves and upstream trash. Somewhere farther down the river, just past the large rock that looked inviting as a place to lounge until you noticed that it was covered with wolf spiders, a whole crushed camping trailer had been hanging out of a clump of trees since before her mother was born, an empty shell of crumpled corrugated aluminum that had lost its chassis and interior almost as if it had shed that skin like a cicada setting out for the skies. It still showed traces of white and turquoise paint, and used to have a pair of small decorative metal wings until Alice’s brother had wrenched them off as a trophy and propped them up on the hearth at home.

“River’s so low now,” Max said, having left his shoes on the bank and started walking delicately across the dry shallows, where ten thousand hot, sharp stones stabbed as his feet. Alice kept her sandals on, intending to tie them to her swimsuit once in the water. They reached the water and waded out. It was that time in the summer when the river slowed down for a bit and rivergrass grew so dense and thick that it was like being in a hairbrush. “Ugh, gross.”

“You big baby.”

You’re the baby!” yelled Max, and splashed Alice with a fantail of cool water as she was fastening her sandals to the bottom of her suit.

“Oh, you’re dead!” she said, and dove into the cool tangle of rivergrass and slow water, emerging just upstream of Max with a slashing motion of slim arms and cupped hands. Both laughed, and swam for the deep channel.

© 2019 Joe Belknap Wall

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1.

There was a perfectly good porch just up the hill with a perfectly comfortable chair, but it was the kind of unseasonably pleasant August afternoon that put Lois in mind to carry her basket and a linen cloth down to the edge of the dirt road that looked out over the railway easement, across the narrow strip of the northernmost field of Chris Harden’s farm where you could sometimes just catch the afternoon light sparkling on the Potomac through the trees. She unfolded and shook out the cloth before spreading it out on the unruly grass there and easing herself into a familiar spot where a little hollow in the ground made for a comfortable seat.

The freight traffic was heavy, and had been for a few days, but the distant cries of locomotives signaling as they approached Orleans Crossroads from the south and looped around the little town to head east to Maryland and then the bigger cities still gave her the giddy feeling she remembered as a little girl when they thundered through, albeit more quietly now, with the old diesels relegated to the scrapyards in favor of all-electric locomotives that plied the routes, playing the overhead wires like a violin bow. She adjusted the angle of her broad-brimmed straw hat, extracted a large mesh bag from her basket, set that to her right, and set a large plastic bowl to her left.

In a pattern she’d perfected over the eighty-five years that had slipped by since her grandmother had sat with her on her own porch, having determined that she’d reached the right age to join the consort on the porch in the practice of manually processing bushels of string beans for canning, she pulled string beans out of the bag one at a time, snapped the flower end of the bean and pulled the string off the pod, then snapped the vine end, stringed the other side, snapped each bean in two, and tossed the pieces into her bowl. A freight train called from the far side of the double bend to the northeast, and she snapped beans in a careful rhythm that counted out its approach until the low-set bright blue scout car zipped into view, paced far enough ahead of the train to send back detailed reports on the local conditions to the heavy freight locomotive.

The scout zipped away, its camera array whirling in the clear dome that it wore like a little helmet, and Lois paused, waiting just long enough for the locomotive to lumber in. As a little girl, she’d have run down to wave to the engineer, but modern locomotives were entirely windowless and streamlined except for the various ports for the cameras, laser rangefinders, and other sensing equipment they used, and anyone human on the train would be comfortably ensconced in the caboose, ready for spot maintenance tasks or just deadheading the trip to get to another work site. Nevertheless, she raised a hand, wondering if the trains had gotten smart enough yet to appreciate the gesture, before returning to her string beans.

The train cars hissed and shifted, heaving over from banking right on the previous bend to banking left in anticipation of the tight bend around the town, and both the scout car and the locomotive had identified Lois as a person or person-sized object of roughly the size and temperature as a person and had assessed no change in her position and had therefore noted that no further action was required. Lois strung and snapped handfuls of beans as two kilometers of container freight streamed by, plastered with the logos of their places of origin, looking up only as the caboose passed to see if anyone was framed in the windows, but she couldn’t make out any faces, so she kept to her task, tossing discarded tips and strings into the grass to her side as she went.

After a time, when she’d emptied out the mesh bag of beans and filled the bowl, she folded the bag and placed it and the bowl in her basket, then sat back on her elbows to bask in the sun for a moment. In the distance, she could just make out the thin, windy sound of the approaching Capitol Limited heading for Chicago on the monorail track suspended on pylons over the cycleway on the river side of the tracks, and watched it plunge into view and disappear again as quickly, full of people on their way from elsewhere to another elsewhere. Sometimes, she’d wave, or raise her straw hat to give the travelers a little local color, but even as the passenger trains slowed slightly for the series of upcoming tight bends, as close as she was to the tracks, they’d barely see her for a moment before she was gone.

Missing out on a good bet, she thought, getting to her feet, shaking out and folding up the linen cloth, tucking it into the basket with her other things, and trudging up the hillside with the steady, measured gait of someone who had neither the time nor patience to be in a hurry.

© 2019 Joe Belknap Wall

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