This was a piece I discovered in my archives this week. This was an assignment given to us in week 1 of Clarion West by John Kessel, which was to write a thousand-word flash piece that started with a list. What I ended up was a little long, but I still liked it when I came across it again.
So here you have it. Happy New Year!
And Every Moment Before This One
By Kris Millering
“Flanges?”
“Check.”
“Radio?”
“Check.”
“Steering wheel, brake pedal, stuffed tiger, copy of the Odyssey?”
“…hey.”
I craned my neck around to look at my co-pilot. “What, no copy of the Odyssey?” The towel scrunched up under my ass as I turned slightly. I always liked to have something between me and bare vinyl, especially when it was so hot in the barn.
“No stuffed tiger.” He held up a worn copy of a book, half its cover torn off and the spine broken so the pages fluffed out like a scared cat. “Katy, are you sure about this? We could go back. Do some yoga. Meditate. Mom always says meditation is good for you.” He pulled the bandana he wore over his mouth down and frowned at me. “Calms you down.”
I snorted. “Your mom also says that Rice Krispies aren’t food. I don’t believe a word your mom says.” I turned resolutely away from Pete, scrunched down in my seat. One hand on the ray gun at my side, one hand on the smooth plastic of the steering wheel. “Plug it in, let’s go.”
“Katy. You bought this kit at Wal-Mart.” Pete had messy brown hair and worried brown eyes. He was a scholarship kid, just like me. We’d been best friends since he’d thrown his shoe at me at recess in second grade, when we both had been in public elementary school. “Maybe Sister Mary is right. Maybe we’re not supposed to be messing with this stuff. Seriously, my mom can touch the top of her head with her feet. She’d teach us if we asked.”
Sister Mary of the swift black heels and the crucifix as big as a dish antenna on her wall. Sister Mary who would hold a brush full of paint and tell us that we could paint our souls, paint our way to an understanding of God. The smell of linoleum and hardwood curling up in the heat, old gum, school lunches. My paintings always turned out murky, with unrecognizable things swirling in their depths.
I jammed my dad’s fishing hat down over my ears. The floppy brim brushed the tip of my nose. “If you’re gonna go, Pete, go. I don’t need a stupid co-pilot.”
“I am not stupid!” He was yelling but there were tears threatening in his voice. “You’re stupid. This thing is stupid. I’m going home.” True to his word, Pete clambered out of the seat behind me and hit the ground with both feet. A few moments later, the side door to the barn banged open, and he was gone.
“Hope you get stuck in the bog,” I muttered, but there were tears sliding down the side of my nose. One stayed on my lips. I licked it, tasting salt. The directions in the kit had been very specific. Two pilots. I now only had one. And maybe not a best friend any more either.
Einstein proved that time is an illusion, the instructions said in big letters at the top of the page. I wondered what the stuffed tiger had to do with anything. And now you can be a chrononaut too, with this easy build-it-yourself kit!
I was glad that Pete wasn’t here to see me crying.
The ray gun was a stupid piece of plastic, purchased at the same time as the kit. I tossed it into the cavernous dim of the barn, towards where dad’s truck sat just like it had every day since he’d been gone. He’d backed it into the barn to unload some grain for the cows and the stallion we were boarding for one of the people from town. Probably wanted to get out of the sun. It was hot, that day.
I’d only known something was wrong when the school bus had dropped me off and there was a fire truck and an ambulance in the yard. Mom ran over to me and hugged me and I knew that there was something so wrong that nothing would ever be right again. “If only someone had been there,” she had said later, at the funeral. “He was trying to get to the cab of his truck. Damned fool, leaving his cell phone in there.”
If only someone had been there.
I told Pete that we were going to go see real living dinosaurs. I didn’t tell him that I planned to make a stop on the way. “Sorry, Sister Mary,” I muttered. She always hugged me and told me that if I ever needed to talk, I could. She smelled like erasers, like sunlight. It was true that she didn’t approve of time travel. She was nice, anyway. I was going to miss her when we went to live with Grandma. The cows were sold, the farm was almost sold. When the sale went through, we were moving to Cincinnati.
I didn’t want to go to Cincinnati. I wanted to stay in my school, on the farm. I wanted Pete as my best friend and the cows in the barn and even the mean horse named Kitten who tried to bite me when I leaned on his gate. I wanted my mom to come home from her waitressing job and call my dad on the cell and tell him to get his butt in, and roll her eyes when he told her he and the Boone boys still had two more fields to cultivate.
And I wanted my dad, the biggest, tallest guy in the world, to come in finally and lift me up and say, Hey, there’s my pumpkin, aren’t you just the sweetest squash on the vine?
I was crying again. I climbed out of the cockpit and went to look in the box the kit had come in. I scrubbed my nose on my sleeve and dug into the cardboard dividers and plastic bags that had held various bits that hadn’t been much on their own, but when combined with things any farm kid could lay their hands on, became something a lot more.
In the bottom of the box was a stuffed tiger the size of my hand, mouth open in a soft-fanged grin.
I hugged it, plugged the electric cord that came from the back of the time machine into a socket on one of the upright beams, and clambered back into the cockpit made of a big wooden crate and a pair of discarded seats from someone’s old Chevy. I read the instructions carefully once more. The only thing I had wrong was no co-pilot.
That was all right. I figured that there were some places, some times, you could only go on your own.
I set the dial to the moment everything had gone wrong, leaned forward, and pressed the switch.
