None But Eagles

I was sitting at a table at the mall downtown looking through my library books while waiting to meet up with Scott before heading out for dinner. A woman tried to give me a ‘loot bag’ in exchange for enough personal information to steal my identity. The only memorable thing about this encounter was her opening line: “I see you’re reading a book, you must like reading, I like reading too, wow I see you have a whole stack there, isn’t reading wonderful?” With commas between her independent clauses and everything. She stared at me very intensely and very emptily while she delivered her pitch through to its unsuccessful end, but she accepted my refusal with grace at last. I’m still trying to figure out which Saturday Night Live character she most resembled.

Wearing socks to bed gave her insomnia, but she didn’t realize it until many nights had passed in staring at the ceiling examining the sensation of her erratic heartbeat or trying to discern the translucent object of her anxiety or rearranging herself within the bed again and then again and then again, trying not to think.

She only ever wore socks to bed on especially cold nights after especially cold days. At first, after getting into bed and warming quickly, she would feel secure with readiness for sleep. But after some time, more time than it usually took her to drift off, she transcended beyond expectation of sleep, beyond warmth; a place painful and disturbed but too vague to be understood.

Finally one night staring into the darkness, the evidence assembled itself in the air above her head, and she realized that the socks were keeping her awake. Perhaps they were the wrong type of socks, or they rubbed the bedsheets the wrong way, or their fibre was of a particular type that stimulated secret nerves on the soles of her feet. However it was, she yanked them off and threw them into a corner where they scattered a silent assembly of dust bunnies and tiny nighttime creatures. She fell asleep within seconds, and in the morning they were gone.

A vague chill fog

ampersunder:

We were still a little drunk on New Year’s morning while preparing for our next assignment, so the schematics were a more accurate reflection of the bottles we had emptied and the glasses we had broken over the holidays than of the route by which we planned to carry out our task.

We arrived at the wrong end of the industrial complex, where centuries of air pollution had created a unique weather system separate from the rest of the city. It was absurdly hot and sunny; our heads steamed as we carried our parkas rolled up on our backs with the rest of the gear and took shallow, measured breaths. We walked for hours, days perhaps, before the real atmosphere came into sight, a vague chill fog in the distance beyond the relentless sunbeams.

The weather had been calm when we left the hotel, but as we emerged into winter zipping up our coats, a snow squall hit us full in our faces and we bent over backwards trying to stay upright. We pushed toward the nearest building and took refuge in a doorway.

The door had no handle. It originally served as an emergency exit only until they realized during the first evacuation that the door opened in the wrong direction. There was a sign hung too high for any of us to read, its message scratched and faded.

We gathered close together on the threshold, shrinking back from the reach of the wind. We kept our arms stiff at our sides, pretending nonchalance. The closeness of the space slowly warmed us, but we couldn’t look at each other’s faces. We turned our eyes outwards to watch the storm, but we leaned hard against the door and not each other.

Someone opened the door from the inside and we toppled to the ground at her feet in a heap. She held an empty coffee cup in one hand and gazed at us from behind thick glasses with her tiny black eyes like a mouse’s. 

“Whoops,” she said, “wrong way,” and tried to close the door. But our bodies were in the way, piled on the ground, half-inside, half-outside, links of sausage coming unstuffed. She let go of the door and it swung away from us. She retreated into the darkness, wheezing or whistling, we weren’t sure which. We exchanged looks and scrambled to our feet and went inside.

Sometimes words make a nice sound splashing together in a glass and the colours complement each other in interesting ways and the light reflects off the surface in pleasing patterns but still I hesitate to take a sip.

Last night I spent a few hours rereading This Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas instead of sleeping. In spite of its flaws I love it at lot, probably mostly for the part where the narrator learns to knit socks from a book in a rented cottage on the seaside and then goes to the pub next door to drink beer while she knits and the bartender offers her free firewood and beer in exchange for a pair of socks. The only tragic thing about the universe is that I lack the patience to learn how to knit socks myself.

Christmas was different this year. For one thing, we celebrated it in two family occasions where we usually had one. The first was on Friday, a sit-down turkey dinner at my parents’ house with my immediate family and maternal grandparents, which amounted to twenty-one people, six of whom were children. The second was a soup-and-buns buffet-style lunch with the extended family, also at my parents’ house. The other big difference is that family gatherings are very much kid-centred now. Not that this is a new thing — my sister and my cousin had five kids between them last year (two of them infants) — but now my other two sisters also have kids of their own (one set of infant twins and one pair of step-kids-to-be), so the proportion of kids versus adults has greatly increased. For the last ten years or so, we’ve done Secret Santas or gift exchange games because almost everyone was old enough to buy gifts for each other, but this year, everyone brought gifts for the kids. The pendulum has swung back into the madness my siblings and cousins and I made when we were kids ourselves.

As a devoted aunt, I took it upon myself to serve as child-wrangler. Of course I was only one in an army of child-wranglers, and I was only willing to wrangle a subset of all possible children, but playing with the kids is one of the best parts of family gatherings, so I took full advantage of this duty while everyone else prepared food or washed dishes or had grown-up conversations.

I followed one-year-old Isabel around to make sure she didn’t climb up the stairs by herself or open a bottle of ginger ale or drink someone’s wine or eat any wrapping paper. I carried her around and hummed a song and rubbed her back when she showed signs of being sleepy, although this only ever led to a thirty-second power nap after which she gabbled at me, clearly thanking me for the rest but asking if she could please get down now so she can try the stairs again?

My greatest accomplishment this Christmas (other than the raw-egg-white-less eggnog!) was getting three-year-old Alexander to say a whole sentence. He knows a lot of words and will repeat what you say (when I say, “Hey, buddy!” to him, he says it right back to me. We’re good pals), but he doesn’t do sentences yet. So we were upstairs by ourselves in the spare room, where it was much quieter and cooler, playing a game that involved me dragging him across the bed by his legs and tickling him until he crawled away (a variation on an earlier game that involved me dragging him out from under a piece of furniture and throwing him onto the sofa, over and over again. My knees are still bruised from that). Every time he wanted me to do it again, I asked him to say, “Grab my legs.” (Completely by accident, it’s also a quote from Castle, although the associations might not be terribly appropriate.) At first he would only say any two of the three words, but finally he started saying the whole thing, following it each time with an enormous grin because he knew very well he was being cute.

The three-month-old twins are not yet of wrangling age (they’re getting close though; they’re not even scary to hold anymore), but I fed, burped, and put to sleep little Moriah. I was cool with not doing the same for Ethan because the last time I held him he threw up on me a lot. They look nothing like twins and less like aliens every time I see them. Ethan has gigantic eyes and makes the best crazy baby faces ever. Moriah is a little more chillax and has grown some impressively chubby cheeks. It’s hard to find something to say about these two because they are still at the eat/burp/sleep/diaper-change time of life, but I’m really looking forward to hearing what they think about the book of nursery rhyme comics I gave them for Christmas.