Here’s Anna and I all through high school: a geeky Hispanic theater boy and a bushy-haired white girl whose geekery took the form of endless D&D games and scores of tattered lurid paperbacks.
Here’s us a few years later, both in the same community college. Still best friends, still sharing trials and tribulations, always with an unspoken question between us, all on Anna’s part, because I knew the answer.
And here’s when I finally answered it, and broke Anna’s heart.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
When I first began to fall through the floor, I wasn’t sure what was happening. The kitchen seemed oddly distorted. The stripes of the wallpaper slanted a little to the left; the orange light of sunset lay over them like a flare of panic. My parents noticed nothing.
My mother was eating a fish sandwich, the McDonald’s wrapper neatly folded in front of her as she dabbed on mayonnaise. My father scraped the pickles and onions off his hamburger with his forefinger, which was streaked with the thick red of ketchup. Only my brother saw and looked at me as the chair’s back legs pierced the linoleum beneath my swinging feet and I tilted back with agonizing slowness.
I didn’t want to say anything at first. We usually didn’t talk much at the dinner table. Most of the time we didn’t eat at the table at all. My father brought home paper bags of food and set them on the counter so we could each take our share and vanish. Sometimes I sat on the grille of the heating vent. Warm air blew around my body. My brother crouched near me, both of us reading.My father would take a glass of wine and his food and sit in front of the television. We could hear him twisting the dial back and forth to avoid the commercials. My mother sat in the living room near us, reading one of the romances which she devoured like french fries. We read science fiction and fantasy.
“Catherine’s falling,” my brother said.
My mother looked up. The chair angled more abruptly and I was on the floor. The chair was sprawled in front of me. Its back legs had nearly disappeared. I could see the ragged edges of the holes, like mouths forced open by stiff wooden rods.
My mother picked me up. I was crying now. My father pushed his chair back and looked at the floor. He continued to chew.
“That linoleum’s rotten,” he said. “I’ll have to fix it some time this weekend.”
Perhaps that makes him sound like a handyman, a fixer, someone who put things together. He wasn’t. Our house was broken hinges, stuck doors, worn carpets. Rather than take out a broken basement window, he piled dirt on the outside. To insulate it, he said. It made the basement a little darker, but that added to the mystery.
I liked to play there. Behind the furnace, there was a little space like a room. It smelled of house dust, dry air, and whiskey. I found a marble in a corner, amber colored glass. It was scratched in places where it had rolled across the cement floor. It would have been beautiful when it was new. When you held it up to your eye and looked through, everything was different, everything curved and bled together.
I took a half burned white candle from our dining room table down there. It was this which led to the basement being declared off-limits. My mother found the candle and thought I had been lighting it.
I liked having the candle there, in case there was a disaster, a tornado, an explosion, a nuclear bomb. Sometimes it was frightening in the basement. There were holes in the walls that led out in little tunnels and you couldn’t be sure something wasn’t watching you when your back was turned. I stuck the candle in a bottle. There were a lot of bottles down there, piled behind the furnace.
I could see the holes in the ceiling, between two smoke black beams, where the chair legs had gone through. The light from the kitchen came into the basement.
A month went by before the holes were repaired. We avoided the dent in the floor with its two accusing circles. Sometimes I imagined I felt the floor soften beneath my feet elsewhere in the kitchen and quickly stepped sideways. My brother and I watched each other when we were in the same room, as though afraid one might disappear and leave the other here alone.
Finally my father called a man in a blue hat, who came and tapped mysteriously in the basement. My brother and I sat up above, crosslegged on the floor, and watched the linoleum smooth itself out as he replaced the boards. The holes remained.
In the other room, my father watched a golf tournament. We could hear his breathing and sharp grunts whenever a putt rolled smoothly across the grass, heading into the hole like a ball with a purpose. When the man came up, my father offered him a beer and had my mother write out a check.
We went out to Happytime Pizza that night. The restaurant was clean; there were no holes in the floor. The windows were diamonds of colored glass, lead running like angry veins between them. The sunlight came through them and painted my father’s face with red and dark blue.
I reached my hand into a patch of green lying on the table’s surface and then took it out. No one was watching me. My mother and father held the menu between them. There was a wet ring on the wood of the table from my father’s beer glass. I put my hand into the color again and moved it back and forth, letting the light paint my hand as though smoothing it with color.
My brother kicked me gently under the table and moved his hand into the green too. We held our hands on either side of it, letting the very edge of the color bleed onto our hands, not daring to move in.
...
They were the first to arrive, and Ms. Liberty took the opportunity to select, not the sturdiest chair (a hefty wooden bench) in the room, which the Unicorn would probably need, but the second sturdiest. Her augmented flesh was denser than that of most of the other team members, and she thought that breaking a chair would be a bad way to start off her first week with the team. The chair she picked was made of metal and was unyielding underneath her ans she sat down. She tried to relax into it, tried to assume the pose that would convey her attitude when others entered the room: not too eager but certainly on the alert.
Meanwhile, X wandered the corners of the room, extruded a long thin tentacle, which thoroughly explored the inner workings of the coffeepot, fingered the edges of the map of the world thumbtacked to the wall next to the nonfunctioning video screen. Over Antarctica, someone had scrawled in barely legible green pen, “Kilroy was here.” Air blew in through the vents, the only real source of sound in the room other than their breathing and the sounds of their movement.
The clock on the wall, which hung a little askew as though buffeted somehow in the past, clicked, and the hand clicked over to a minute before the hour. The door swung open and Dr. Raffy emerged, arms full of navy-blue folders stamped with the Squadron’s logo. He nodded at both of them and began to put a folder at each seat. X turned into a porcupine and waddled over to take the seat next to Ms. Liberty, a plain pine kitchen chair, its seat well-worn with use.
The Gladhander was the next to appear. “Ladies, gentleman”¦” He smirked as he slid into his chair, a leather Aeron that gave silently underneath him. The door opened again to show the Silver Juggler and Ballboy, both looking ill at ease and unhappy.
At the hour, Dr. Raffy began to speak, despite the lack of the Unicorn.
“If you’ll open the folders in front of you and turn to the first page, which is printed on cornflower blue paper, you’ll see our agenda.”
They all dutifully did so. The writer side of Ms. Liberty noted several spots where passive voice could be eliminated, a sentence whose parallel structure was insufficiently clear, and an out of place comma.
Dr. Raffy continued. “I’d like to welcome our new members officially, Ms. Liberty and X. While the circumstances that have opened new positions on our team have been sad, we are glad to have their new insights and experiences.” He smiled at Ms. Liberty and she smiled back, feeling genuinely welcome for the first time.
“Here, here,” the Silver Juggler said and led the room in a round of polite applause. X blushed purple appreciation.
“I know that you all read their backgrounds while undergoing the application process,” Dr. Raffy said, “so I won’t bother with recapping who they are. Their presence, unfortunately, brings us to agenda item number two: the smallness of our quarters.”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t mind the smallness of the rooms. Reminds me of when I was first enlisted serving on the submarine Helvetica,” the Silver Juggler said. Beside him Ballboy nodded enthusiastically.
“It’s no skin off my back,” Dr. Raffy pointed out. “I have my own quarters and there suitable for my needs. Should we postpone the item for further discussion in the next meeting?” He spoke quickly, as though rushing them through the item and Ms Liberty wondered what the hurry was.
The clock ticked to the ten after mark. The door opened and the Unicorn sidled in. “You better not be done talking about the living quarters, Raff,” he said without preamble. “I got something to say about all that shit.”
Dr. Raffy sighed. “Your arrival is timely,” he said wryly. “We were just discussing that very item.”
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