Call Me Ishmael

Chapter 6

Author's Note: After eating, wait one hour before going in the water.  You can buy this book at Amazon, B&N, and at Smashwords for any other device. 

Ishmael, I had called myself.  It was turning out to be a prophetic choice.  The original Ishmael, in the Old Testament. had been turned out into the desert became a wild horse of a man.  In Moby Dick, Ishmael was the sole survivor of the attack by the great white whale.  Now I was in the unusual situation of finding myself in the center of the world coming to an end, attacked not by a giant whale, but by a few strokes of an pen a generation before.  And, not just my world, but an infinity of worlds, was at stake.  It staggered my imagination.  That morning last week, when a little boy decided to skip brushing my teeth, had ruptured the universe in twain, one in which he had and one in which he hadn’t.  He was a veritable creator, his every decision splitting the atom of the universe and sending a planet of six billion people in two separate directions.  And every one of those six billion other people were doing the same thing.

Except me. 

I heard the garden shears stop, and then resume, a little closer to the house.  Finnie got up from the sofa and moved to the window in a low crouch.  I must admit, the girl could give crouching lessons to ninjas.  She moved with a quiet, deadly grace that made me want to eat walnuts whole, crushing them with my teeth and spitting out the fragments.  I had a vague notion that such a display would impress her. 

I dared a whisper.  “I think I have some walnuts here somewhere.”

Finnie glared at me, and jerked her head toward the window.  Jerked is such a crude word for the smooth, fluid movement of Finnie’s head and shoulder as she indicated that I should pay attention to the outside of the house.  I looked out of the window, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Down!” she shouted, and flattened herself, as best she was able, against the floor.  Some parts of her did not flatten as well as others, but I had little time to notice.  The house exploded as I dropped to the floor myself.

Finnie rolled across the burning carpet and sprang to her feet.  “Move!” she cried, and I moved. 

I dashed across the ruined carpet.  I had bought that carpet, or carpet much like it, in another dimension, and had paid over nine dollars a square foot.  It seemed a shame to watch it burn, but there was little time for regrets and less time to do anything about it.  The walls caught fire, and the  smoke made it difficult to breath.  I coughed and tasted fire in my throat, with not a slush drink dispenser in sight.  Finnie led the way to the hole in the wall where the front door had been just a few moments before. 

I half-expected Niles to step through the wall, still looking for his keys.  The wall was a smoking mess of drywall, wallpaper and some of those little home interior decorator items.  The plastic vines were fused to the wall, and most of the sconces were shattered like broken eggs.  “What a waste,” I muttered, “Those stupid things are like fifteen bucks apiece.”

Finnie grabbed one of the remaining sconces.  “These are more like twenty.  All the prices went up in the new catalog, and they don’t even give hostess points anymore!”  She squeezed the sconce.  It shattered, and she dashed the pieces to the ruined floor.  She shook her head, hard, like she had just come up from a deep dive in an over-chlorinated pool.

“Finnie?  Are you alright?”

She nodded. 

A voice shattered the mood.  Well, it wasn’t much of a mood, really, but I felt something move between Finnie and myself, some sort of recognition of a mutual wellspring of tension.  Who knows what may have happened?  Perhaps her hand would have moved from smashing sconces to holding mine.