Singularity

           Vic bellied up to the counter at Kerr’s and ordered a donut and a coffee, black. He smiled, waited for the waitress with the glistening bald head—to each her own—to respond with a smile at his joke, but she dropped the dinner menu in front of him and shuffled humidly to the next customer.

Vic settled into his chair and swiveled it so he could take in the room. Ten tables all filled with the jabbering of languages he had never heard before, if that’s what they were. Some sounds were hushed like the breeze in summer leaves. The corner table buzzed and hummed like the live wires which, judging from the blue arcs dancing among those three seated lovers, they might actually be.

It had been days/weeks/seconds/millennia since Vic’s resupply interport went off course on the Orion route and found its way to Monoceros, which is the surprising location that Vic, who was still coughing up perfluorocarbon from the long dream of space travel, had to check through an actual window before he’d believe it. Nobody had ever ventured out this far and for good reason. Human anatomy plus even a weak x-ray nova like A0620 make for a painful—albeit quick—death.

Nevertheless, here he was, and he realized that he was hungry. He swiveled back to take a look at the menu. Yes, here he was, and here was the donut he asked for, just like he liked it, on a black plate with a yellow rim.

He regarded the chocolate torus on his plate.

There was something about that shape that got him every time, reminded him of stuff he learned about at pilot school, stuff like singularities and wormholes. He closed his eyes tight.

Black holes.

Monoceros.

There’s no way his little pressurized can with its third-hand negative mass thrusters and graviton sail could have avoided the event horizon of that system, the nearest black hole to Earth. He remembered waking up jarringly from the long sleep at the alarm. He remembered understanding quickly how screwed he actually was. He remembered settling into his seat and cranking the music: Kevlar’s “Subtonal Opera Number i,” the favorite of his youth, to focus his mind. He remembered the vague nausea and the strange blue shimmer as the starfield curved into an ever-shrinking ellipse.

And then he remembered nothing until the tinkling of this bell and the welcoming electric aroma of coffee.

Vic poked his finger through the hole of the donut and lifted it like a ring. He took a bite. Now that was real, he thought. He was sure of that.

A song came on the diner’s jukebox, that oldie by Sir Carter Knowles he used to like.

How was that possible?

He turned again to find the room filled with people—actual human people—dressed sharp and happily eating breakfast. At the corner table sat a woman with two small boys. One boy ate oatmeal and melons while he colored his placemat with a crayon. The other held a chocolate donut aloft on his index finger, nibbling the edge and turning it slowly.

Vic smiled.

Nice family.

The dress the mother wore looked so familiar. It looked just like the one that his mom wore on Sundays when she bribed her sons to go to church with her by taking them out for breakfast afterward.

She lifted her head and, for the first time, noticed Vic.

A curious puzzlement came over her face.

She lifted her hand as if to wave, but Vic turned away in alarm.

This could not be happening.

He shook his head, dug his fingernails into each palm to try to wake up. It was as if he had been snared by something unimaginably more powerful than himself.

Unconsciously, he nibbled at the slowly rotating donut that he held aloft, his index finger poked through the hole, and felt his memory, his mind, his body stretched thin through a prism of confusion and loss.

Spaghetti.

That’s what he felt like for dinner.

Spaghetti.

The Science Fair

The Science Fair

It is the annual science fair, and I am a judge. I’ve taught high school Physics for twenty years now. I get called to do science fairs pretty often. Comes with the territory. This particular fair is is in a town a few over from mine. Five high schools are here, and for two hours I need to feign interest in pH graphs, conductivity, fruit flies, and dissections done by students I don’t know.

I am 45 years old.

A periodic comet is a remnant of the creation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, I learn from a mousy boy’s poster. It is massive enough to be buffeted by everything gravitationally as it makes its chaotic orbit, its outsides bombarded by the solar wind. Not bad. Thanks, I say, and move along. The boy eyes my white judge’s ribbon nervously.

Just after the kid who flipped nickels one hundred thousand times, and recorded each one (good lord), is a poster about the melting properties of various winter road treatments. I don’t like winter driving at all. A barbaric age we live in. The poster is unattended. On the right wing of the trifold is a photo of a mangled car at the bottom of a snowy ditch. I reach out to touch it and remember a friend I loved deeply, dead just like that on an icy road. Years have passed and the wound is still fresh. I close my eyes to try to pull her image from my memory.

When I open my eyes, I see the girl who has come back to her poster. She has a paper cup filled with water. Water is melted ice. She smiles.

Her eyes.

So familiar somehow. But she is no student of mine.

And the crooked smile.

Nice poster, I say. Tell me about it.

Her project is more memoir than anything scientific. She tells me about her family—two younger sisters, her mother—how they slid into the wrong lane on an icy road, how none of them survived.

She tells me that they had been searching for a house—the first they’d buy. Her mother wanted a log home on a river so she could canoe. The girl argued that it would be too far to travel to school and she would have no social life that far away from other people.

Secretly, she thought that her mom was too picky, that they should just buy something and it would feel like home. She tilts her head to laugh as if she is pouring a small cup of happiness from a pitcher.

Her father hadn’t come back from Germany after the divorce, even after the accident. That's where he's from, the girl told me. She lived with cousins on her mother’s side now. He’s from Germany, she told me again and finished the water.

Our children—I have none—our children—this child—are chunks of dirty ice that hurtle out of the Oort Cloud, propelled by god knows what at 40 km/sec. They all start off intact and massive and seek the warm sun that, like all desires, blinds and burns us.

Our past is the tail of a comet, chunks of our young selves careening off gloriously into color and light, trailing behind our diminishing bodies.

She tells me things about her family—secrets. I feel compelled to reciprocate. A few years back, I met a woman on a beach in Maine, I want to tell her. We both stopped and stared at each other. We shared our names and tried to figure out how we knew each other. We tried everything, interests, geography, common friends, nor were our names familiar to each other in any way. She grew up in New Hampshire, me in New York City. She went to college in Maine, I in North Carolina. And so on. There was no overlap. And yet were were certain. We smiled at the strangeness and eventually parted.

This mystical loneliness, broken parts of us melting off into the void, pieces of us shattering, our bodies diminished second by second by the light and heat and mass that calls to us across the void of loneliness.

Her mother—dead for a year—wanted a log home on a river. Her daughter, alone now, studies road salt. I teach Physics. An hour ago, I knew a lot of things. I was a judge at this science fair, for example.

Now, right this second, I know less than nothing.

A Slight Sore Throat

I have a slight sore throat

Probably nothing

My allergies

Semi-asthmatic

But wondering what I did

What guard I let down

The touch to the face

After the food delivery?

A weird dream that unsettled

A shadow.

I am fine

Good Friday 2020

A New Week Begins!

Sunday starts a new week, gentlemen. How is your writing going? This is such an exceptional time to be alive; journals of these years will be useful for historians, I am sure. And they're useful for us, too, as we dance with this epidemic. So what is on your mind? How are you spending your days? What do you imagine doing six months from now?
I'll have something new up on Monday.. I am working on a new story..

A Grim Thought

I know that it's not this easy, but the thought crossed my mind this evening, and I thought it might be worth sharing. Two boys died so that we might have Hamlet. No, it's not that easy.

So Richard III is accused of killing his two nephews in the tower at the end of the War of the Roses in order to make his path to the throne easier. But the truth was that he was already Lord Protector and was essentially the king already. Most people were buying that the boys were bastards or didn't deserve a shot at the throne, and Richard was a war hero and a friend of the people. Many have pointed to the fact that the death of the two boys really served Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond better. With the Plantagenet family completely erased, his family stood nearest the throne.

The Tudor family brought nothing but chaos to the English throne. The trials of Henry VIII trying to get an heir -- first he fought for the Roman Church, then he fought against it. His two daughters did the same -- one for, one against. By the time that Elizabeth was able to bring some semblance of order to the nation, the fundamentalists had managed to get in there and change the direction of the country. Education was low; the health of the people was low; leadership was weak at best. The theater was a perfect place for cheap and easy entertainment away from all the troubles of the world.

Shakespeare emerges from this time as a shining light -- a man who brought the theater to a place of moral quandary, of self-examination. While he wrestled with big questions of government and religion and war and sickness, he also managed to get in the very personal. Would this have happened without the death of those two boys, without the rise of the Tudors? I know it's not this easy, but the thought crossed my mind, and I thought it might be worth sharing.