CHAPTER 8
1419 Words
CHAPTER 8Mara steered her Subaru Outback onto the Johnson Creek Road exit off Interstate 205 in southeast Portland, sending a small spray of water that had accumulated on the roadway onto the shoulder. She focused intently on the road, making a show of peering through the downpour, hoping against hope that Sam would take the hint. Turning on the radio, turning up the volume and fiddling with various controls on the dashboard hadn’t done the trick. He continued to ramble on as she turned right onto Eighty-Second Avenue and headed toward the Mason Fix-It Shop on Woodstock Boulevard in southeast Portland where she worked.
“What does he look like?” Sam said, waiting a second and then tapping Mara’s arm. “Hey, are you awake?”
“Huh, who? What does who look like?” she said.
“Our father. My dad. What does he look like?”
“We’ve got some pictures at home. Maybe you could ask Mom to show you this evening.”
“Does he come up here to visit?”
“Not often. I go down to San Francisco occasionally, but he’s very busy with his patients, so it’s complicated to coordinate time together.”
“Does he like basketball? So what’s he like?”
“He’s very, very not, ah, open-minded, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, he’s a heart surgeon, a scientist. He only believes in what he can touch or test or study in a lab. There’s no way we are going to get him to believe in metaphysics or sentience or any of the other stuff we’ve been dealing with these last few weeks.”
“So what does that mean? What are you trying to say?”
She opened her mouth, thought better of what she was about to say, then said, “I’m not trying to say anything. I think you should discuss it with Mom. She’ll know how to best handle things with Dad.”
“Well, he’s got to think it’s cool to have a son. I mean, what man doesn’t want to have a son? Not that there’s anything wrong with daughters—it’s just, you know, different.”
“Yeah, it’s going to be different all right,” Mara said, flipping the turn signal and taking a left onto Woodstock Boulevard. “Look, I’m going to pull up to the curb and drop you off in front of the bakery. I’ve got to pick up some parts before I go into the shop. Ask Ping if he can stop by and see me later today. I’d like to have a little chat with him. Can you do that?”
“Sure. Ping’s gonna freak when I tell him I have a dad.”
“We’re all freakin’ a little bit about that,” Mara said as she pulled over and popped the lock on Sam’s door. “Okay, make a dash for it.” She nodded through the rain toward the green awning under the lit Ping’s Bakery sign, a shiny, bright beacon on a block of worn storefronts, including the Mason Fix-It Shop where Mara worked.
* * *
A strong spicy-sweet aroma hit Sam the minute he flung himself through the front door of Ping’s Bakery. While clearly open for business, the front portion of the bakery was deserted. No customers sat at the little round tables or stood in front of the register above the glass display case filled with cakes and pastries. The swinging doors leading back into the kitchen swayed ever-so-slightly. Ping must have walked in there for something.
“Hey, Ping!” Sam shouted as he shook himself off over the large Welcome mat in front of the door. “Did you know I have a father?”
Clad in white pants, a T-shirt and apron, Ping pushed open the swinging doors with a hip while holding a couple pies. “What’s that you say?” he said, quickly setting the pie plates on the counter. He flapped his hands in the air. “Hot!”
“I have a dad who lives in San Francisco, and he’s a heart surgeon. Isn’t that cool? I can’t wait to meet him.”
“Hmm, I guess it didn’t occur to me to ask about your father. Mara never mentioned him, but it’s not like we’ve had a lot of time to discuss it. Did you have a father when you lived in your own realm?”
“No. Diana, my mom there, would never talk about him. I’ve always suspected she did something to him. You know, like fed him to one of her lizards or something.”
Ping slipped off his quilted mitts and placed them next to the pies on the counter. “You know, Sam, this might be a little complicated, explaining where you came from. You’ve been lucky so far that your mother, your mother here in this realm, has such an open mind about metaphysical matters. Your father might be a completely different story.”
“I wish everyone would quit saying stuff like that. I would really like to meet him. What’s wrong with that?”
Ping walked around the counter and wiped his hands on the apron that strained against his ample midsection. “Come have a seat.” He pulled out a chair and sat down at the closest table.
Sam flopped into a chair. “We’re going to have one of our talks, aren’t we?”
“We’ve only known each other for about two months. I hadn’t realized we had established a pattern already.”
“Yeah, there’s a pattern.”
“Anyway it’s not really any of my business to get involved with your family life, but I don’t want to see you get hurt. So I’ll say what I have to say, and then we’ll get back to work. Okay?”
“Fine.”
“As we have discussed before, the people in this realm don’t seem to be aware of the true nature of reality. They don’t know that they exist in other realms as well as this one, that they have lives and experiences beyond what they perceive here.”
“I know, but once we explain it to him, he’ll know I’m his son, right? I mean, Mom figured it out all on her own even though her body was taken over by her counterpart. Dad can figure it out too, right?”
“I don’t know, Sam. We don’t even know if he would be open to such concepts, not to mention the shock of having a son who he didn’t know about. That has profound emotional implications for a man, even without all the metaphysical issues your presence here raises.”
“What are you saying? That I can never meet my own father?”
“No, but it might take some time. Your mother is still getting used to having a son, and now she has to figure out how to tell her ex-husband about you. That’s very complicated. You may need to be patient. I would follow your mother’s guidance about this. Don’t push too hard, or you might get hurt.”
“Oh, okay, but I don’t think it’s fair that Mara gets to have a father, and I don’t. I mean, I think my dad would like me, don’t you?”
“Any man would be proud to have you as a son, Sam. I think getting him to believe that he has a son is a completely different matter. Since your mom knows him best—”
Ping’s eyes widened, and his body tensed. He grabbed the edge of the table, and his body shook, causing the legs of the table to clatter against the floor. His face reddened and bulged as he tried to stand up, knocking over his chair.
“Ping! What’s happening?” Sam jumped up, sending his own chair to the floor.
Ping gritted his teeth and reached up into the air, grasping for something that wasn’t there. His entire frame bulged, his skin tightening to a sheen over his face. Staggering backward, he labored to take in air. “I, I, I don’t know, but you bet-better step back!”
Ping exploded into a cloud of dark gray dust that swirled frenetically filling the entire front of the bakery. Sam held his arms in front of his face as the granules pelted him. The maelstrom accelerated, throwing tables and chairs against the wall, flinging the pies off the counter, spinning in tighter and tighter circles, consolidating in a spherical mass at the center of the room. Out of the gritty, swirling blob, two appendages reached up to the ceiling and spread out toward the walls.
Sam peeked over his forearms, watching the gray extensions flatten out and flap, trying to catch air like wings. Another appendage, larger and more amorphous than the wings, emerged and stretched toward him. The dust roiled in midair, taking on an almost liquid quality as it sculpted itself into the visage of a serpent, three feet wide. Its sandy gray eyes opened, and its jaws snapped at the air. Staggering backward, Sam grabbed the edge of the counter and crab-walked behind it, sliding on pie remains along the way. The creature retracted, coiling on an unseen neck in preparation of striking.
Ducking behind the glass counter, Sam yelled, “No! You are supposed to be asleep. Sleep!”
The dust fell to the ground in a pile in the now-empty center of the room.
After a moment, the gray grit swirled again, but this time in a vertical cone, soon taking the shape of a man. It condensed and solidified into Ping, with a look of shock on his face.
“What happened?” Ping said.
Sam kicked remains of pumpkin pie off his shoe and said, “I’m not sure, but I think I prompted that dragon inside you to go back to sleep.”
- Writer
