2/26/13

Triadic Tales - Fifteen Minutes Before a Roaring Fire - Short Story (Part One)

LOST STARS

Triadic Tales - Fifteen Minutes Before a Roaring Fire - Short Story (Part One) PART TWO

Adam went out to the Vineyard when he needed time to himself. The Broadley family had digs in Menemsha that were for him a sort of second home. 

This visit was for Adam a chance to complete a commission to write a musical narrative for a Bicentennial event. He had completed the lyrics and melodies and shipped them off to someone who could transform his taped effusions into the notation that would enable others to sing what he had written. It remained to get some history done. How did  John Wesley's heart get strangely warmed? How did  "Methodist", the insult, become approbation? 

Adam slept in the front bedroom, not far from the living room and various other rooms adjacent to the large kitchen that was often the scene of informal meals. 
  
On this trip, he woke daily to the sound of argumentation from the master bedroom. The back and forth would make Woody Allen proud. To Adam, the overheard nattering boded the likely dissolution of whatever union there was. 

Adam went way back with the Broadleys and could  remember Morton Broadley's Wife One as if it was yesterday. Wife Two, in the bedroom down the hall, had one of those names you register if you are calling the roll of prominent New England families, with an accent on Newport. Wife Two was now complaining with such energy that Adam could not imagine what sleeping next to her might do, other than cause serious wanderlust. 

It was odd that, when everyone was up, there was no hint of this early morning acrimony. Adam could not figure out what the lack of boudoir inhibition, with him so nearby, signified. 
It confused him.

Adam spent the day undisturbed on one of the couches in the sunken living room, determining that Wesley had indeed been moved to universal love at Aldersgate and that Methodists had been tarred with the name Methodist to the point that they took it as a badge of honor. 

Morton came in as the radio played a country song called Too Cold at Home

"Good song," Morton said. 
 
It was late afternoon when the intelligence arrived. Wife Two's half-sister was coming to supper with her consort. 

I see no need to go into identities because, at this point, all it would likely create is what Adam's friend Bob out in Vegas said when Adam later mentioned that he had spent fifteen minutes with her

"You're lying," he said.

So peremptory and final was Bob's verdict that it convinced Adam that it was dangerous to friendship to appear unbelievable. 

So he kept quiet about his fifteen minutes at Menemsha.

Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store

Follow Me on Pinterest


Buffer

Triadic Tales - Last Morning - Short Story (Part Three)

REACH FOR THE SKY

Triadic Tales - Last Morning - Short Story (Part Three) PART TWO PART ONE

How did he know that this would be the day that he died? To tell the truth, he did not know. And it really made no difference to him. He had lived a long time by the measure of earth's chronology. Everything was tuned to the minutes and hours of  this place in this universe. He thought about floating from universe to universe and understood why the body perished so that it made no difference what happened to it when life had passed from it. And he knew that it would be true death as far as he was concerned.

What he had done, whatever history he had made, would be subsumed in the next iteration, whatever it might turn out to be. What he had thought, his vision of a world beyond the car, would remain perhaps, joining, supplemented and being modified, by billions of other cogitations, all within the earth's chronology. It was unfathomable, what existed in the state beyond this one. No one knew. Many mansions in one house perhaps. That's what Jesus thought. Bellngham would soon find out.

The girl had risen and walked out of the kiosk. It was still too early for her to be engaged with whoever might come around, whoever might wonder about the world of rocks and all the other elements of geology. If it was geological, she could cover it in any direction and at almost any level. All it took was a touch of the screen and a few spoken phrases. The new school. Voluntary. Open. This was what Bellingham had seen as a younger man, part of the world beyond binary. Here in this place, he had won the battle. The world had moved his way.

Bellingham breathed deeply. The air was clear. The interstate was empty except for a few double-wide vehicles plying their routes. These days travel was down. One rode easily between communities. A cluster of ten communities - around 100,000 souls in all - composed a Cyber-City.  How easily worries about overcrowding could be dispelled, once the first cyber-communities began to develop.

Bye bye

She was getting closer to where he stood. He turned slowly and their eyes met. He was instantly aware of a somber but palpable person, present and unusual. She stopped.

"I'm new," she said. "You are Mr. Bellingham. I recognized you."

He nodded. Something was broken now. It made him sad.

"Peter Bellinghan," he said, "still here."

"I am here because I read your work."

"Ah. And how did you like it?"

"I'm very surprised."

"Why?"

"I did not expect the - I didn't anticipate -"

"The fact that it works."

"Yesterday was my first work day. I think I reached almost everyone who showed up. It was quite amazing."

"Tell me about it."

She came forward and stood  next to him, looking outward.

"I was explaining some elementary things to some children when this woman appeared and demanded information about Inge Lehman. I told her that I would gladly get the information if she would explain to the children what she what she knew about Inge  Lehman.  If not, she would need to come back when the children were finished. Amazingly, the whole thing transmogrified into a mini-seminar on Lehman's work and on the contribution of other woman scientists."

"Transmogrified. I love that."

"I am a word person."

"So am I," Bellingham said.

He wanted to take her hand. A child, maybe 12 years old, appeared at the entrance to the kiosk. She turned to go.

"I don't even know your name."

"I'm Amanda," she said with her back to him, She led the boy inside.

"Amanda. Good by, Amanda.," he said softly, looking out..

Bellingham turned and walked down a slight incline. There were ten such gentle spirals in the whole complex, each allowing movement up and down the four levels. Side spokes appeared at irregular intervals, allowing passage to and from the ways. Every two-hundred feet or so, there was a level space with tables and chairs and childrens' play equipment. Almost everything in the compact yet oddly spacious community had a retractable top. When there was rain it was  entirely  collected.

There was no waste. Everything was used. Just as Bellinghan had imagined before there ever were cyber-communities.

"They will have to come up with something to replace turning a corner," Bellinghan musing as he walked.

Something took hold of him. It was not a pain. But it was something definite and he walked to a table in the next square and gingerly sat down.

Again he heard music inside him. But this time it was his own. His Peace Oratorio.

Let the earth listen and all that fills it
World and all that comes from it

Now it was left to him simply to sit and wait.

END

Stephen's Remarkable Kindle Store 

Follow Me on Pinterest


Buffer

RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

The Slow as Molasses Press