Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce

Author:Thomas Pierce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-16T04:00:00+00:00

People Falling on Snow/Ice Funny!!!

Twenty-two thousand feet overhead, Beth is on her way out West. When her seatmate leans toward her and says his name is Randolph, she laughs.

“What’s so funny?” he wants to know.

“Nothing,” she says, embarrassed, hand rising to her mouth. She’s never been the giggly sort. Her father used to call her his Gloomy Little Mac-Beth. She wonders if it’s possible her seatmate is having this effect on her. “I’m just excited,” she says. “That’s all. I drank too much water or something. Maybe it’s the air pressure.”

The man has a white linen pocket square in his sports coat and some kind of gel product in his brown hair that makes it shine. He’s in the window seat and he has his shoes off, one socked tumescence rubbing the other. She tries not to examine his feet. Through the porthole the darkness is interrupted every few seconds by the flashing bulbs on the wing. Sometimes the wings appear to wobble, a fact she finds very disconcerting.

“Let me guess,” Randolph says. “A ski trip.”

“Snowboarding, actually,” she says. The trip is an early graduation gift from her mother. Beth is meeting a friend at the airport. In a few months Beth will have her B.A. in sociology. Her thesis is a case study of frequent-flier programs. According to her laptop’s Find function, the term sociotechnical appears in her paper seventy-three times. Though she has studied frequent-flier programs, Beth does not belong to any herself. She doesn’t find this fact ironic, as she has flown maybe three times in her entire life, present flight included.

“I do development,” the man says. “For a children’s hospital.”

She nods politely, too politely, and the man unloads about the latest capital campaign, how they’re trying to raise $5.2 million, and how he’s close to getting it—so, so close. Fingers crossed he’s lined up a very famous actor to help raise the last few million. She asks him what actor, and he says he shouldn’t reveal that yet, but then nuzzles close and whispers, Skeet Ulrich. “I’m sorry,” she says, “who?” He gives her a wounded look.

When the plane lands, they stand up too early, together, and have to hunch beneath the bins. “Well, it was nice to meet you,” she says when they start to move, but then there’s another delay, and he says, “We’re never going to get out of here, are we?”

“There must be some kind of way out of—” she says but doesn’t finish the lyric because the line is moving again.

They part ways in the terminal, but she sees him again at baggage claim. Before wheeling away his roller suitcase, he tips an imaginary top hat to her. When her bag shows up, Beth takes a bus to the rental car office. Amy, her friend since grade school, is already there with the keys. The drive to the resort is almost two hours. They talk about the end of school and the drugs they’ve never tried but might still and all

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