Mother of Invention by Caeli Wolfson Widger

Author:Caeli Wolfson Widger [Wolfson Widger, Caeli]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503950078
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2018-05-21T22:00:00+00:00

The plane taxied down the runway in Albuquerque. Lifted, banked, angled up into the sky. When it leveled off Wayne opened the window to the night outside. Finally, he was on the red-eye back to Boston. The route back to Viv didn’t feel as good as he’d hoped. He’d anticipated feeling freer at this moment, with the chores of his ISA presentation and Colony visit behind him. A day with Viv ahead. But he found himself dreading the reunion. Dreading the work he’d have to do in order to make his importation deadline.

He ordered a whiskey from the flight attendant. She produced a microbottle of Jameson and a plastic cup.

“Two, please, actually,” said Wayne, and she hesitated before handing over another.

Wayne unscrewed the bottle and skipped the cup. He rarely drank, but when he did, only whiskey did the job. The man seated beside him, a doughy guy in his fifties, ordered a beer and poured it into his plastic cup. Wayne watched him tip the green bottle at an angle to create an inch of foamy head, admire his pour, and take a sip.

Wayne looked away. He hated beer. It reminded him of his father, popping the tabs of his cans so hard foam spewed into the air.

He gazed out the oval window of the plane at the stars. In the distance, he saw the lights of another plane. Wasn’t that supposed to be good luck?

Or was it bad?

He watched the other plane drifting parallel, no more than a few bright blips in the night sky. He thought of the lives inside it, all the flesh and blood and memory, suspended thirty thousand feet in the air. Lives that mattered deeply to a handful of individuals, but in the grander scheme, not at all. The world was a massive, thrumming force of life. It repopulated and marched on. Its memory was pliable and forgiving.

Wayne uncapped the second Jameson. The whiskey was doing its work. Loosening the locks on the disciplined compartments of his mind.

He tapped his tablet to look at a picture of Viv. There she was: midlaugh, eyes lit up, hair all over the place.

He loved her. He hadn’t gotten to love that many things in his life.

When he closed his eyes, there on the back of his lids was Puke. His dog, another thing he’d loved.

When Wayne was eight, Puke slept with him at night, in the trailer on the Hi-Line. Ugly as puke, his father had said of the rottweiler-heeler mutt who’d wandered up to their trailer one day, dragging a stake and a chain, all ribs and mange. They’d driven him back down to the end of the road and dumped him there, but the dog kept showing up, tongue hanging from his mouth like a ribbon. Wayne had never gotten permission to keep him; he simply did, stealing ground chuck and jerky to feed him, rigging a ramp up to his bedroom window so that Puke could enter and exit the trailer without his father noticing.

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