I find writing a short story challenging to say the least. Longer fiction is much easier since as an author you have more words to play with to develop characters, smooth out the plot, set the scene and generally making the story more interesting. Recently I tried to write a short story for a contest entry where the limitation was simply no more than 600 words. That sounded easy enough since my verbose computer can crank out that many words describing a naked white painted wall. So with that in mind and after an hour or two of what if time, I decided on a subject dear to my heart, the universe and quantum physics, but one that despite reading a number of books on the subject, I have to confess major ignorance and even less understanding. Never one to worry about a low knowledge base, I forged ahead and cranked out a couple thousand words, which I thought would be easy to slash down to six hundred.
Not so fast, Kemo sabe, my long suffering spouse, editor and bespectacled critic exclaimed, you take that out and it won’t make sense. After much agony over every word, the following story emerged, which you as the reader will have to determine whether or not it makes sense or is worth your time.
Since I also love to fiddle with Photoshop, I made a cover for it also. The finished short story and its cover are included below. Get out your editor’s pencil and tell us what you think.
The View From Above
By
Dave Folsom
Its lenticular shape gave Harry the sense of looking into a bottomless hole or over the side of a tall building. The black mysterious blemish pulled like fingers, drawing him into its depth, its lure completely out of proportion to its imperceptible size. Harry peered at the monitor screen which manipulated, strengthened and sharpened the minute image coming through his latest, most advanced, computer-enhanced electron microscope. His eyes focused on the nucleus of a newly created isotope. More particularly, he squinted at the dark spot. A feeling of excitement rose in the pit of his stomach.
Professor Harry Ederle, fascinated by the rare dark dot, studied this new one intently. It was darker than the others, larger and somehow alive. Harry’s students regularly slept through his lectures, lulled in to a lethargic state by his droning voice and the tedious subject matter. Most were sure he slept in his lab coat and his hair invariably stood up in back, like he’d just momentarily arose from a nap. Harry’s suits tended toward tweed, his shirts always white, with wrinkles enough to resemble a road map. Sometimes, he forgot to shave. Frequently, as his students suspected, he slept in the lab, draped on a second-hand couch, still wearing his lab coat.
“Have you tried it yet?” The soft, familiar voice of his long-time assistant touched his preoccupation. Valerie Dunn had worked ten years at his side, struggling to attain her PhD, and it still eluded her. Thirty-three and ten years younger than Harry Ederle, she had never married.
“See the spot? It’s bigger than any of the others. Look at the edges, there seems to be light coming from somewhere deep inside.”
“How could that be?” Valerie mumbled, peering over Ederle’s shoulder. “There can’t be any depth to them, right?”
“Damn”, he mumbled, “something is there, in the center, but I can’t tell what it is.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Valerie’s hand rested on Ederle’s back, a familiarity born of their years together. Harry, as usual, didn’t notice.
“Maybe we could reprogram the contrast, strengthen it somehow, and it’ll enable us to see what’s in the center because something’s in there,” Ederle mused.
“Nothing can be that small, can it?” Valerie questioned.
“Small is relative. Compared to what? The earth is immense compared to an atom, yet infinitesimal compared to the universe.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Suppose for a minute that the earth and all the stars and planets, in fact all matter in the universe was simply part of something larger?”
“Like what?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know what.”
Valerie didn’t answer. She couldn’t fathom the relative size. Surely there was an end somewhere. Some finite distance that ended everything.
It took hours of programming but Harry finally manipulated the contrast upward by five percent. Not a lot, but when he looked at the spot again, it shone brilliant black on his monitor screen. What he saw tightened his stomach and brought breakfast refluxing into his throat. The center shone a bright golden hue that illuminated multi-colored darker spheres. Harry watched as the mysterious spheres floated in organized orbits around the center light. He counted nine, some larger, some smaller and nearly invisible. Now, what the hell are those, he wondered? The hair on his neck stood tall and he unconsciously shivered. Harry couldn’t help the reaction, a weird sensation that clutched at his core. Shaken, he realized someone, something, was watching from above.
Copyright © 2011 Dave Folsom
All rights reserved.
I didn’t vote for President Obama
I’ll admit that I didn’t vote for President Obama. I made this decision based on a couple of problems. First and foremost, other than he’d been a freshman senator from Illinois for less than three years, he had a pretty sparse record in national politics. He’d been a “community organizer,” a civil rights attorney, taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, served three terms as an Illinois state senator prior to his election as a U.S. Senator. There is no doubt that he is a very bright individual with many talents, and an eloquent speaker, but running a large state, or even a large business is not among his experiences. I couldn’t wrap my head around that inexperience. Even his record in the U.S Senate was unremarkable at best. When he was elected President, I hoped was he up to the challenge and comfortable with the fact we’d elected the first African-American President. Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out as well as I’d hoped.
His political history, in retrospect, hinted that his priorities as President would include a social change agenda that revolved around more entitlements and redistribution of wealth vision of this country that appears out of touch with most Americans. His first effort was a so-called “cap and trade” idea that would have likely damaged our economy beyond repair by “necessarily raising the price of energy…,” a possibility that added to current fuel prices would leave most families struggling to pay everyday expenses. Cap and trade, was the President’s idea for making the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful, while making the rest of us even more dependent on entitlements. Thank heaven; our do-nothing Congress did nothing with it. Next, the President proposed the Health Care Reform Bill, or as it is now known as “Obamacare,” a voluminous two thousand page bill that no one read and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi quipped, “we have to pass this bill so we can know what’s in it.” I paraphrased her statement but most of us found her notion laughable. At the last count, twenty states have joined in a suit claiming the part requiring every American to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. I don’t know how all this is going to turn out, but knowing the government, taxpayers will undoubtedly get the short end of the stick.
For the last two years the Obama administration, failing to get anything passed in Congress, has turned out a trainload of new regulations, executive orders, and directives which to all accounts have sent the economy into its current tailspin. At the same time, controversy over immigration policy, or the lack thereof, an energy policy that includes millions of taxpayer money to a solar panel company that promptly filed bankruptcy, and bungled ATF gun running operation known as “Fast and Furious”, has most taxpayers wondering if we can survive another year.
President Obama was right about one thing. We need a change and hopefully it’s soon.