A Dangerous Age by Ellen Gilchrist

Author:Ellen Gilchrist
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2008-01-18T13:00:00+00:00

ON APRIL 8, 2005, at 9:45 a.m., Bobby Tree sat down at a simulated cockpit and dropped the first bomb on a village. At 9:57 he launched a rocket that described an arc that landed on a bunker, took aerial photographs of a ten-mile section of land to the north of Baghdad, and flew back to a landing strip in the desert near Syria.

When he stopped for lunch, he was drenched with sweat. “Goddamn,” he told a friend. “This is work.”

OLIVIA WAS SITTING in her office, eating rye crackers and soy cheese and vegetable chips. She was drinking ginger tea from a Yoga Studio cup so old it had begun to look like raku pottery. She studied the lines on the cup, the beautiful cracks that led everywhere and nowhere, and she thought about the years she had spent doing yoga with the woman who had given her the cup, who had died seven months ago from an aggressive lung cancer that had attacked and spread thirteen years after she quit smoking. Yin and yang, Olivia decided. And what in the hell am I doing this far away from Bobby when the United States of America is at war and all my writing and yelling couldn’t get 1 percent more citizens of the state of Oklahoma to cast a vote in a presidential election. There are bigger fish to fry than selling advertising for Jim’s newspaper.

Olivia was in a slump because the publishers had refused to print an editorial about the war, saying the editorial was too biased in favor of the administration.

I quit, Olivia decided. I used to like this job. Now I hate it. I don’t know why I ever took this job, and I don’t like to sit behind this desk on the first really beautiful sunny spring day in a week. It’s unhealthy for my baby to breathe this air. I need to get out where the air is better than this. I want to go to Tahlequah and see Granddaddy and Grandmother.

She picked up some notes on a yellow legal pad and studied them. Then she began to type on the old-fashioned typewriter she kept on a stand in her office. It had belonged to her aunt Anna. It was the last typewriter Anna had used before she died. It was the typewriter Anna used to write Prime Numbers and Binding Energy.

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