Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer

Author:Jeff VanderMeer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: fantasy, short story, short stories
Publisher: Cheeky Frawg Books
Published: 2011-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

THE SECRET LIVES OF

JOHN AND MAUREEN DAVEY

John and Maureen Davey lead productive, fast-paced lives as the founders and owners of the world infamous “Jayde Design: Building, Computing, & Publishing—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design,” although recently their company split like rapidly mutating cells into “Jayde Design: Publishing, Distributing, & Computing—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design” and “Jayde Designs: Building, Management, & Surveying—Consultancy, Contracting, & Design.” To simplify matters, John sometimes makes up letterhead for himself that reads “John Davey: Builder by Trade, Surveyor by Profession, Writer by Hobby.”

“Sometimes,” Maureen has been known to say to John, “I think we have taken on too much. Sometimes I think there are small third-world countries that have less work to do than Jayde Design and Jayde Designs.”

Then John smiles his clandestine smile and the sudden light in his eyes and the light in her eyes display a perfect harmony of secrecy.

Neither he nor Maureen ever let on to their friends about the particulars of their secret life, however—a life they carve out for themselves in the minutes, the seconds, the moments, at which their over-active brains are not pulsing toward the solution to some multi-faceted consultancy, contracting, or design problem. (It is theorized by one of their friends, in fact, that the energy caused by the firing of neurons in John and Maureen’s heads has been harnessed by the aliens who live on a planet circling a dying star—a white dwarf—and that this energy alone has kept the star from imploding, and thus John and Maureen are not just responsible for a multi-faceted business, but also for keeping alive an entire alien race, although this is, of course, speculation, not a secret life at all, and at no point in the immediate future will John and Maureen change their moniker to “Jayde Design: Publishing, Distributing, Computing, & Enabling the Survival of Alien Intelligent Life Across the Galaxy”.)

What is their secret life? When they can grab the time, they work together as Inventors of the Impractical—conceiving of inventions that would, perhaps, be universally admired in a parallel universe but which (they realize) may never be appreciated in this one. Together, they draw out the designs, they pencil in the descriptions on graph paper. They debate (over drinks) the pros and cons of each invention.

“Plastic,” he will say in a stray moment when Jayde Design(s) does not require their attention.

“Breathing tube,” she will say hours later, in another free second, with an almost lascivious smile.

“Furniture saver,” he will say, the next day, in the car, with a leer.

“Pets!” she will reply that evening, over dinner, giving him a long hug.

Shortly thereafter an invention is born that allows a pet owner to wrap his or her dog or cat in a plastic sheath complete with hole in the back and an air tube—providing for full freedom of movement, but negating any possible injury to furniture from fur, hairball, or claws.

“No more need to cover the furniture in plastic,” Maureen says, looking down at the finished design, breathless, happy.

“Cut off the problem at the source,” John says, hugging her.

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