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When the Q&A tapered to an end, I gathered my notes into the scuffed brown leather briefcase that Paola had given me when I took my master’s degree. I thanked the A/V assistant for his halfhearted efforts and headed for the main entrance to the conference center to wait for a shuttle to my hotel.
I had been pacing the sidewalk waiting for the van for several minutes when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the fellow from the back of the conference room. He appeared to be trying much too hard not to attract my attention.
Note: See But Wait! There’s More…. for an explanation of the 100 Words project. Read the previous installment or the next one.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
Amy pulled the Jeep into a space in short-term parking more than an hour before his flight was to arrive. She usually waited for him in the passenger pickup area outside. But with what she needed to tell him, she decided to greet him as soon as he cleared the security checkpoint on his way to baggage claim. She dropped the parking stub on the passenger seat and slung her purse over her shoulder. She didn’t think to notice which floor of the garage she was on. She crossed the garage in a few long strides, stepped into an open elevator, and absently pressed the button for the ground floor. The doors opened; down a breezy walkway and through a set of automated doors, she entered the noise and commotion of the terminal building.
She located the big board displaying the arrivals and departures for the next several hours. David’s flight was on time, arriving in …more
Still, I answered their questions carefully and with all the patience I could summon. I was eager to return to my room, to shower, dress, and join Martina for dinner. As delighted as I was to visit California for the first time, her presence was the highlight of the trip. One of my UC colleagues had recommended a restaurant where we’d dine al fresco while the sun sank into the Pacific.
I wondered whether one of these dull faces concealed a mind that could parlay my mathematical shortcut into a quantum theory of gravity—the Holy Grail of theoretical physics.
Note: See But Wait! There’s More…. for an explanation of the 100 Words project. Read the previous installment or the next one.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
The boy saw his youngest sister reaching for the handle. The pot of soup was threatening to boil over on the front burner of the stove. His mother had told him a thousand times, “You must always turn the handle away from the edge, because otherwise your little sisters will try to grab them, and then they’ll spill hot stuff all over themselves. So it is very important for you to turn the handle the right way.” It was only decades later that he thought about how much responsibility that was to place on the shoulders of an 11-year-old boy, even if he was tall enough to use the stove, and responsible enough to be trusted with cooking for the family, and handy enough in the kitchen not just to open up and prepare canned soups, but also to cook some simple recipes. So he was always very careful to keep the pot handles parallel to the edge of the stove when he stood cooking in front of it, and to turn them another forty-five degrees away from the edge if he ever had to step away from the stove—but never for more than a moment.
But the babysitter was not as careful, even though she was 17 and should have known better, so sometimes he had to be careful for her, turning the handles to a safe position when she stepped away to answer the phone and to have long, giggling conversations with her boyfriend or one of her girlfriends from school about boys and songs on the radio and hair and makeup and teachers. But this time he was not watching, he was in the family room in front of the television, and he wasn’t supposed to have to take care of his sisters, that’s what the babysitter was for, but even though he was mostly paying attention to an episode of Star Trek that he’d seen seven or eight times already, in the back of his mind he knew that something wasn’t right, and he could smell the canned beef stew cooking, and he could hear it bubbling on the stove, and then in a moment he was seized by the vision of his youngest sister, the one who had recently become very curious about the universe of things above her head, and he could see her standing in front of the stove and looking up at the rattling pot and wondering what to make of the bubbles of stew starting to splash over the edge of the pot, and he could see her reaching for the handle, and he could see her pulling the boiling liquid over, spilling it on her face and neck and arms and screaming with pain and fear while the babysitter stood transfixed in shock or panic or disbelief, so he jumped up from the carpeted floor and ran into the kitchen and turned the handle on the pot away from the edge, and then he stormed into the hall, grabbed the phone out of the hand of the surprised babysitter, slammed it down on the receiver, and stood rooted to the floor in front of her, his face red with rage, angry tears streaming down his face.
Note: The prompt for this exercise was to write a text that “starts with someone reaching for something.” I had a lot of trouble with this one, maybe because it was the next one up when Hurricane Ike came along, so I tried several false starts at moments when focus was somewhat lacking. I finally cranked out this mostly stream-of-consciousness piece to get past the roadblock.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
The presentation itself was uneventful. In one of the smaller conference rooms, a sparse crowd listened with polite attention to the case I laid out for my technique. A few over-achievers in the front rows scribbled page after page of meticulous notes as I stepped through two dozen slides. By the time I prodded my sleepy A/V assistant to bring the lights up for the Q&A, only those few remained, except for one fellow seated near the back.
I fielded a few softball questions. None of these Ph.D. hopefuls had raised any objections that I hadn’t already anticipated and overcome.
Note: See But Wait! There’s More…. for an explanation of the 100 Words project. Read the previous installment or the next one.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
My thoughts drifted to Berkeley, last April. The rationale for my trip to the U.S.—an invitation to present a paper. The world’s best minds in experimental physics gathered for the symposium at UC and heard nothing from me to revolutionize my reputation or their understanding of the universe. My monograph outlined a method for streamlining an excruciatingly complex quantum mechanical equation. At best, it was a stepping stone on someone else’s road to Stockholm. For me, it was a desperate measure to keep my job and funding for the project that would earn my place in the history books.
Note: See But Wait! There’s More…. for an explanation of the 100 Words project. Read the previous installment or the next one.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
A dark gap appeared where the seam had been earlier, the trap door having receded slightly into the wall. Then it slid noiselessly upward out of sight, revealing blackness. Next, the strangest part of the vision: the tray rose a couple of inches off the floor and glided through the opening. As soon as it disappeared into the void, the door slid back into place and moved outward to seal the gap with a barely audible whishhh.
Two conclusions became immediately clear:
Someone was doing research on a track parallel to mine.
That someone had left me in the dust.
Note: See But Wait! There’s More…. for an explanation of the 100 Words project. Read the previous installment or the next one.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
I had no idea how to exploit the discovery. I withdrew to one side, lay face down with my head resting on folded arms, and pretended to sleep. The light through the small window faded to sunset gold that gave way to silver moonrise. But my visual observations didn’t synch with my sense of time. I began to suspect that the source was artificial, yet controlled in movement, color, and intensity to create the appearance of natural light to any prisoner in this cell.
Before long, real sleep began to overtake me. But I snapped alert to a faint sound.
Note: See But Wait! There’s More…. for an explanation of the 100 Words project. Read the previous installment or the next one.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
I turned my attention to the spot where the meal had appeared. Probing with my fingertips, I examined an area out to a couple of feet from the tray, but could detect no cracks or indentations. I explored the base of the wall. There! Parallel to the floor and about 10 inches above it, I felt a hairline fissure, just enough to catch against the edge of a fingernail. I traced its length—perhaps two feet. At either end, it met at a right angle with a vertical seam that dropped to the floor. I had found a trap door.
Note: See But Wait! There’s More…. for an explanation of the 100 Words project. Read the previous installment or the next one.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
Letter to a young homosexual
Dear much younger self,
This is a warning from your future self. Ignore it at your peril.
I’m afraid you probably will ignore it, because you aren’t looking for advice. You’re looking for absolute answers, and you have some very limited ideas about where to look for them. You will not find any of the answers that I can give you in the places you’re comfortable looking.
There is so much I could tell you, but what I wish for …more
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