Catapult by Emily Fridlund

Author:Emily Fridlund
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781946448064
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2017-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

TIME DIFFERENCE

“It’s raining in Hollywood.” Her brother’s voice skips notes.

“It is raining,” she tells him over the phone. “That’s some magic you have there, the Internet.” When his silence sails past comfortable, she adds, “Everything okay in the Dairy State?”

“Why are you asking?” His voice is pentatonic, black-keyed.

“It’s pretty late—”

“It’s just after eleven!”

“Okay, okay,” she soothes.

For a moment she thinks he’s right, there’s nothing wrong. And she feels bad for her chastising tone, for wanting off the phone, until she remembers he’s obscured an important point that establishes their distance.

“My time it’s almost midnight,” she tells him. “Your time it’s nearly two.”

*

Her mother on the phone the next morning is apologetic. “Did I wake you up?”

“Well—” She pours coffee to clear her head and sits down in front of the window, out of which she sees two doves nicking and fluffing each other with beaks. They’re perched on a wet wire, and every time they touch, the whole thing drips across the yard.

“How’re you doing? Did you say you’ve been volunteering?”

“Yeah.” She holds the mug on her knee, feeling the warmth spread through her from that one point. She’s proud of her good intentions and worried at the same time that they’re just that, with no underlying fact of generosity. She tells her mother, “It’s nothing. I haven’t really started yet. I just finished training.”

The birds outside lift the feathers on their necks like hackles: now doves, now tiny spiked predators. Her neighbor in his yellow car has flooded his engine trying to get it started. It occurs to her, suddenly, that her mother must have forgotten the time difference, too, or else why would she call so early on a Friday morning? “I’m a little groggy. I’m sorry, Mom. You know, it’s still pretty early here.”

“Your brother’s in jail.”

“Okay.” She closes her eyes, opens them.

She tries to think about how he sounded last night on the phone, whether she knew and ignored what’s obvious when she looks back on it. But the doves shimmy across the wire, and her mind drifts. While she’s thinking about how she used to call her brother from a friend’s house when they were kids, while she’s thinking about how she used to say, “The Wizard’s coming for you,” and how thrilled her little brother had been, how terrified, while she’s thinking about how it seemed like she was blessing him at the time, but how her pleasure might also have come from succeeding in the lie, her mother tells her about her brother’s second DWI. Then, without any noticeable transition, her mother starts talking about her own father, who died in 1957 on a wheat farm in Texas. She explains the difference between summer wheat and winter wheat, how the latter sprouts with the first freeze and then lies dormant till spring.

“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Mom.”

“Everyone was always saying it was icy. It was an icy morning in the wheat fields. But now I wonder if it wasn’t an easier thing to say than he was drunk again and that’s why he crashed.

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