Modified Raptures

Copyright ©2016 by Jamie Spencer Sentia Publishing Company has the exclusive rights to reproduce this work, to prepare derivative works from this work, to publicly distribute this work, to publicly perform this work, and to publicly display this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-9976934-3-0 Stage One SHELLEY AND ASTRID She’d as good as assured him of it nine hours before, and Yes. There she was. That cascade of auburn hair. No cornrows threading through it, true; no longer caged by that crimson baseball cap, granted. He’d never glimpsed those broad, bare, elegant shoulders, but her slender and finely-muscled build did strum a major chord or two. So did the warm but mischievous smile. Scott Preston was in his third year as an English grad student, and his second as a Teaching Assistant. He’d been trying lately to climb out of a funk he’d been in. For half a dead year, six empty months since his boyfriend, Visiting Professor Gavin Kuiper, had rocketed away—literally, and now hung a million miles away in space. “His Gav” was up there (“out” was more cosmically accurate) on a planetary way-station, in perpetual stilled motion. Doing what? Educating a parade of prospective Martian settlers. Assorted technicians, botanists, astrobiolgists: pioneer colonists. Up there (up there, out there, what difference. “There” was far, far away) on that station where successive waves of them raced in that same hover. “Well, it serves you right,” Scott sighed, repeating his usual murmur.“You put him there. Your clever great dumb idea.” “Ground Hog Day” is the term Americans apply to what astronomers call the annual winter “crossing day” when the tilt of our splendid azure globe is just half-way to the Spring equinox from December’s dark solstice (though, yes, brilliant solstice in New South Wales). In spite of those bleak six months, one part of Scott had started whispering to him lately that he’d mourned long enough. He knew that the old Scott that was new: more ebullient, more confident, and a better teacher. And who deserved the thanks? Gavin. But just then those reflections were distracting him from that inviting view. Distinct memories of the alluring junior tripped through his mind’s eye, a delightful Rolodex of caught moments that turned those Kuiper memories to air. One was from that fiesta he and Gavin had organized—when was it? Nine months to the day. The sight revived a touch: her firm yet delicate hand grasping his floury one across a flaming grill. Next moment, she was hovered in a bright red Cardinal hat one deck below them at Busch Stadium, her camera primed. And a third: tennis shoe laces clicking, ankles bare, she pacing through the hot, deserted University lounge. And now, well, here she was again. And live. Far more vivid than those three recollections. She was, for once, at rest, perched on his department chair’s hearth. Her still firm, still dainty hands were elevating a Spode saucer of rich, bluish cream. A quaint jade pendant nestled on that bare chest. This sight stirred and arrested him. She made time and his feet stop short. That instant, a rich singularity, harbored unspeakable riches. Excavating Shelley (first) Shelley? Though barely twenty, she’d been acquiring some impressive depths. Exploring each level is like prizing open an orange, releasing an aromatic mist–rich, but with delicate sour threads. But a more pedestrian question waved a hand: What brought her there? This gathering was meant for the university’s English faculty and for its grad students. But Scott that very morning had offered an innovation which the department greeted enthusiastically. (Time would make it a tradition.) His idea? Why not welcome any current sophomores who might be contemplating English as a major? Great notions, sure, but Shell was none of these: neither faculty nor grad student; a junior, not a sophomore, and junior who’d already declared herself a history major. Still, a morning email invitation from Scott, pretty much out of the blue, had intrigued her. She had memories of her own. Of him: his hand across that flaming grill; he (along with, of course, her wonderful “lit perfessor” Gavin) a hundred feet above her at that Cardinal game; his and her shared moment in that muggy Holmes Lounge. So she’d been curious. Intrigued enough to respond. But (characteristically, he was discovering) she responded on her own terms. “I believe I’d like that. If I do, I’ll find you there.” Since her arrival half an hour before, she’d been exploring the stately home (she particularly admired the balcony’s mahogany balustrades) and surveying the milling folks with a calm smile. But what she’d been lavishing attention on were the two rich dishes she’d spent the afternoon preparing, and on one in particular. Now and again she’d return to the festive table and cadge a small sample; she wanted to test the cream’s evolving flavors. Another item there intrigued her on her third return. It hadn’t been there when she arrived. At first inspection it seemed simply green spinach, but she knew she smelled chickpeas and a whiff of, what? Was that curry? Name and ingredients eluded her, but her curiosity was piqued. She adjourned to the hearth with a sample. That rich dish and that glorious fire were proving so seductive, however, that they drove her to carve even deeper, even darker wormholes into her past–deep and dark, yes, but illuminating. * * * * * The one she was revisiting as Scott swung into range was another prolonged instant of ecstatic anxiety from nearly three years before. On that still vivid evening, in warm, breezy, early May, she’d also been waiting. Waiting for her Astrid to arrive for a six o’clock dinner with her family. And, on that expectant night, other memories were cascading. (Just when we think we have caught her in a defining moment, we realize that any moment holds at its heart multiple previous moments. Memory, even if disorderly, can yield ever-receding, but eye-opening perspectives.) A riffling cascade of memories, some sweet, some bitter, began to flow. These were new old memories, she realized—scarcely recalled, never examined before. They flowed and mingled in scarcely an instant, but to unspool them demands time. First, a warm sun flooding through a dusty room; windows in funny, squat shapes letting in the summer sun, dust motes swirling. The sun cast gentle searchlights as she fiddled with a trunk lid. Then she was hitting it with a blue plastic hammer. Soon she’s standing at the center of a slow galaxy of genial dust; some radiant creature barely visible through a golden haze; someone draped in blue; someone who smelled wonderful. A voice called her, wafting from below. “Oh Shell. On my belle. Where’s my wonderful girl? Come down.” Then came a long silence when she would giggle to herself, limbs frozen in hilarious expectation. And then a face coming up, yes up, through the floor, cooing: “Cocoa, sweet belle! Come snuggle.”… But a shiver swallowed both voice and aroma. A wooden thunderclap. “There’s nothing for us up here.” Her dad’s trembling voice as he lumbered down, down, down from overhead. “She’s gone, sweet baby. Your wonderful mom.” Tears strangled his voice. “We have to move on, baby.” Tears hung in her eyes, but he took her hand between his, which reeked of the attic’s dusty molecules. He slapped them on his legs, to rid himself of their grains and aroma. Then he flung the stairs upward until—amazing, scary–they disappeared into the ceiling. Gone too. All that remained was a cold, white, forbidding expanse, as the young girl huddled below. She retained for years to come that blank ceiling, that reverberating report: Aromas, dust, radiance all sucked in an instant into a diminishing black hole... Now a loud metal clang. As she gazed from some high window, a mammoth truck standing outside, maw open, tailpipe breathing out thick vapors. Arms lifting boxes up and out of dad’s room. Boxes full of her stuff stacked by the door. He closed her bedroom door tight, then took her hand as he led her for one last time along the hallway, then down the stairs that led down from that room of hers, down and out from that cold white place. “Our new home, baby.”… A green-lined street with lush saplings—just her height, it seemed. A long, long street that ran absolutely straight and even, to the door of a wide, one-story, brick house. As they walked up the brick path, the bright windows hung before her, right at eye level. A tiny rise on her toes, with her calves barely lifted, let her face the glowing brass doorknob that seemed to grow from the door. The two of them walked into the central hall. What would grow in time for the teen-age Shelley a comfy ranch home was, to her four-year-old self, vast. No stairs leading up. No basement. Nor an attic: no “there” to go “up” to. But still enormous. Whether she turned right or left, all she could see was room after room multiplying in the distance. It was like her head’s mop of short curls in those repeating mirrors, before and behind her endlessly at her dad’s barber’s. The room she picked for her own was a snug one. It was just past the room that was the heart of the house–the spacious, spicy welcoming kitchen. She found those aromas faint, but still they beckoned. There in the kitchen nook’s windows hung “her” new curtains, sheers that captured sunlight from the sky beyond and hung it in festive strips. From day one, she loved the nook at the kitchen’s far end. It’s where she housed a passel of her coloring books. She could read, draw and inhale whenever she felt like it. Her eyes danced from book to book, from table to stove, from spicy cupboard to hanging, jostling pots. These old sights and sounds and smells, like a subterranean stream frozen for years deep down, were now flooding through her as she stood by the front door, transfixed, awaiting her Astrid, as (like those mirrors at the barber’s) she sat by the fire, awaiting Scott. “What’s doing all this?” she’d thought to herself back then. “Graduation? Turning 18? No. It’s my sweet Astrid. She’s opening me up.” She’d hugged herself with delight and impatience. “God, girl will you hurry!? Dad’s going to love her. We all will.” Astrid Astrid Perot was not Shell’s first crush. Far from it. But she was the first crush that grew into love. And a woman’s first love says a lot about her, more often than a man’s. (Men’s attractions, often more spontaneous, can also prove less discriminating.) It was more than a statement of Shell at that moment; it was a firm prediction of her character, tastes, and appetites—her journey of discovery. Astrid, a Hosmer Academy alumna, was a college sophomore at Antire College. She was devoting her spring semester to that Ohio college’s “Work the World” program back home. (Antire practiced its commitment to public service; it encouraged its undergraduates to explore possible careers even before graduation.) Perot, a multi-talented, many-lettered star of Hosmer’s track program, had set records for speed (dashes), endurance (the mile), and a combination of speed, strength and coordination (hurdles). She had strong skills to offer and wanted to see if she had the gift for teaching them. (She found quickly that she did.) She’d initiated the placement procedure from campus the prior September, had assembled, polished and broadcast a resume; had made calls. She’d come to campus for an interview on the Columbus Day weekend. So four months later, she was back home in an intense, one-semester transit, eager to assist what she called her “younger sisters” (and, well, okay–any talented younger “brothers”) in their running, dashing, hurdling, vaulting life. The day Shell first noticed, first really noticed her, the track season was three weeks old. That chilly and drizzly Friday made that year’s vernal equinox, Spring’s debut, decidedly unambitious. It was the last day before Spring break. The coaches had decided that, comfortably indoors, they could put the time to good use by giving the squad some vital pointers. Half way through the three o’clock “chalk talk,” Coach Winter yielded the floor to Astrid.