Excerpt
from "Weightlessness"
William Simon Mallusk was born prematurely
on August the 8th of 1977. His mother, Maisy Serdnum, realized
that her water was breaking in the cafeteria of the University
of Ohio at the salad bar. This was alarming, because her
prenatal stomach was hardly a thing to attract the eyes
of the dean or even the jocks on scholarship. She’d
only developed a curve midway through her figure that she
sometimes rubbed, but it was a nuisance, not an impedance.
Mallusk had been in her for seven months.
Only weeks ago, she’d watched the child as a system
of pixels on an ultrasound, moving like a crustacean. She’d
seen the graceful knotting of his legs and arms, his spine
so prominent it seemed a gruesome caricature of a spine.
Everything looked fine then. She cried through the entire
delivery. After the birth, she was frightened to hold the
child on her chest, as he fit just as easily in her palm.
Bouncing furiously from defibrillation, Mallusk
was a first witness to a distant launch. Tampa home base,
about five miles from the hospital, sent a small rocket,
Luke 2, into the atmosphere for an orbit with three stout
mathematicians on board. Doctors Lugari and Caleb set off
a Code Yellow and a Code Red. Nurses crowded the halls like
flocks of white rabbits. The preemie ward was for ten minutes
a strikingly ethereal green, and Mallusk, sidled with tubes
and electrodes, blinked once beneath his felt blindfold.
But astronauts by nature are fed on red meat
and Melba Toast, while Mallusk had eaten nothing but peanut
butter with raisins for years. He’d developed a need
for bifocals early in life and a tendency towards old coins
and paste, especially the two simultaneously. There was
no doubt in the fact that the rocket had inspired the arrhythmic
beating of Mallusk’s heart, so when Warren McArthur
surfaced in Tampa, Mallusk knew well where he’d surfaced
from. Mallusk had been convalescing from an asthma attack
when he was told the news.
“Warren McArthur just moved in next
door, dear.”
Rebekah Frumkin
Libertyville, IL
rocinante4@earthlink.net
gamineprufrock@mac.com
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