Issue March 2012 Flash Fiction Online March 2012

Still at Royat. Hotel Continental. — A propos of Puller “airing his French” Miss Louisa Metterbrun said something delightful to him the other day at dinner. Puller had been instructing us all in some French idioms until Madame Metterbrun set him right in his pronunciation. He owned that he had made a slip. “But,” says he, wagging his head and pulling up his wristbands with the air of a man thoroughly well satisfied with himself generally, “but I think you’ll allow that I can speak French better than most Englishmen, eh?”

Madame Metterbrun doesn’t exactly know what to say, but Miss Louisa comes to the rescue. “O Mr. Puller” — he is frequently at their house in London, and they know him intimately — “I always say to Mamma, when we’re abroad, that I do like to hear you talk French” — Puller smirks and thinks to himself that this is a girl of sense and rare appreciation — “because,” she goes on quietly, and all at table are listening, “because your speaking French reminds me so of home.” Her home is London. I think Puller won’t ask Miss Louisa for an opinion on his French accent again in a hurry.

The Witch Kantrina turned my wife, Frieda, into a pony. Most people in the village are referring to it as an evil curse and I suppose it was meant to be just that. The truth is our three children have always wanted a pony, and to show their appreciation they’ve begun helping with the household chores and shoveling up their mother’s poop.

I have no idea why my wife thought it was a good idea to fight with a witch over the last sweater on sale at Slattery’s Department Store. Frieda already owned two sweaters. Who needs more than two sweaters?

So now she’s a pony and the children ride her around the yard. I don’t think they’ve ever felt so close to their mother. Frieda used to complain every day about having to cook and clean for me and the youngsters. Now she doesn’t have to. You might say it’s a wish come true for her.

Friends and neighbors console, “You must miss her something awful at night.” But the truth is we rarely made love anymore. Plus, Frieda’s feet were always cold under the covers and her snoring kept me awake.

The Witch Kantrina came by late yesterday and said she was beginning to regret losing her temper and turning Frieda into a pony.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” I assured her. “My wife was the one who tried to grab the last sweater out from under you. And it was Slattery’s biggest sale of the year. Between you and me, Frieda already owned two sweaters. I believe the real sin in this case was my wife’s avarice, and if she could speak, I’m sure she’d agree with me.”

We both looked over at Frieda who was tied to a tree in the front yard. She was neighing and snorting and stomping her hooves in a decidedly negative manner.

“She doesn’t look like she’s agreeing.”

“She’s probably just anxious for her evening hay,” I said, hoping to avoid any further animosity.

“I suppose you want me to lift the spell and change her back.”

A lengthy silence ensued while I pondered the question. “I wouldn’t feel right asking you to go against your convictions on our account,” I answered, finally. “Perhaps as a compromise, you could turn our storage shed over there into a stable.” I’d been feeling ashamed that I hadn’t provided Frieda proper shelter from the weather. We certainly couldn’t allow her in the house.

Kantrina displayed a benevolent smile and nodded. Reciting some sort of Latin incantation, she pointed her wand at the storage shed. In a blinding flash, the small, modest shed enlarged into a fine structure complete with a loft of hay.

I thanked Kantrina profusely, and as she walked away, the children rushed out onto the lawn and joyously untied their mother to lead her into her new home. Frieda got caught up in the excitement and tried to break free but my oldest boy, Timothy, held fast to the rope. His mother bucked ferociously and pulled toward me with her two forelegs flailing in the air.

“Down, Frieda!” I shouted. “No need to thank me.” Finally, she calmed down and allowed the children to lead her into the stable where she enjoyed a delicious feast of magically produced hay.

As is so often the case when people look to do the right thing, everyone gained from this challenging situation. The Witch Kantrina showed the neighbors that, while she should be feared for her power, she should also be admired for her kindness. My wife, Frieda, has a nice comfortable stable with plenty of hay and fewer responsibilities. The children have a wonderful pony to ride. And me, I enjoy the satisfaction of a man who has seen to the happiness of his family.

I remember how the sky looked, in the early days, when we called our time Austerity, not Collapse. I was eleven years old and Huntsville, Alabama was at the peak of the weather boom. Ninety-one degrees in January, everything turning brown, ice and snow a fairy story for every kid under the age of thirteen.

The sky that year was brilliant yellow and red and orange from the dust — even at noon on a clear day, and they were all clear days. Huntsville was a big city then. The weather boom was economic, not meteorological. Great towers were going up all over the place; new water ’cyclers and refiltration systems were being produced on a planetary scale. And Redstone Federal Arsenal was the flickering heart of the entire jump program. The parabolars, those silver marvels, went up every month with hundreds of jumpers.

On jump days I skipped my morning classes. I went up to the roof of my tower. Dawn would be coming up over that strange sky, the ground steaming off the night’s humidity in seconds, hot wind stirring the drying trees. I got up on the observation ledge, heedless of the height, heart throbbing with excitement. If there was any cloud cover at all, even the wispy ones that were high up, I knew the jump was on. I kicked up a little roof-dust with my sneaker, and when the wind blew it, I knew which direction they’d come from.

Understand this: to seed the sky for rain, you have to have human jumpers. There’s something in the way we do it — it requires perfect accuracy, except when it doesn’t. Of course you could have AI plan the jumps, and sometimes they did, but in the end you needed people. It was always more like drawing a picture than building a wall. And art wasn’t the only reason to do it. During Austerity, the jumpers gave us pride. They gave us hope. Back then, it had seemed like the jump teams might yet turn the tide, and every military in the world had hundreds of them.

Those hot mornings, looking south and west from the tower I lived in, I could see the massive parabolars scream off the landing strip at the Arsenal, a dozen of them, right after another, like beads sliding off a string. Each one carried a tiny white glider containing two or three jumpers and all of their gear. Seconds after the first plane launched, the first sonic boom would shake the tower on its foundation, and my ears went numb for an hour or more.

That’s how close I was.

The parabolars rocketed right overhead. With so little cloud cover you could see them go and go and go, higher than you ever thought anything could fly, and then toss their precious cargo before plummeting toward Earth to collect their next load of jumpers. The white gliders whisked silently through the air like so many distant seagulls, and after a ten-count, you could see the jump teams spill out, flying their strange patterns against a dawn sky the color of candy sugar.

It was beautiful.

I was a girl on a roof, in the middle of a city too small to sustain its growth, in the middle of a country of denial, but for ten glorious minutes I was flying. I was free. And then, when the jumpers came close to the ground, their chemical packs spent, their chutes deployed and they’d glide over the city, sometimes crossing so close overhead that you could almost shake hands (and sometimes, it’s true, my hands shook).

It was the end of the world, but we didn’t know it then. I was grown before we knew for sure that the jumps weren’t working, that there weren’t enough chemicals in the world to hold off the drought, that Collapse would win the day. That was a long way away. On those jump mornings, when I was little, the clouds would billow up like cotton candy, beautiful in their blackness, and my parents wept, and they started planning what they would do next year, when things were better.

I believed in those jumpers with all my heart.

I always knew exactly what I wanted to be.