Onion Songs by Steve Rasnic Tem

Author:Steve Rasnic Tem [Tem, Steve Rasnic]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Chomu Press
Published: 2013-03-12T20:00:00+00:00

STRANGENESS

Strangeness, n. In particle physics a quantum characteristic used to describe certain short-lived particles and their transformations when interacting with other particles.

Short-lived particles. Trish looked up from the dictionary at Martin. A half hour ago she’d had to tell him that his best friend from college had dropped dead from a heart attack the previous week. The man’s much younger wife had phoned with the news. She hadn’t provided many details—she’d said she had so many of these calls to make—she just thought Martin would like to know. “Like” seemed cruel in such a circumstance but what word should she use? Want? No, there had been no history. Absolutely none. The woman had skirted around the precise circumstance and Trish, guiltily, had just naturally assumed sex had been involved. A transformation having taken place when two short-lived particles interacted. The result being this alien state, this strangeness, the lights dimmed, no one left at home.

Martin appeared to be taking the news with equanimity. “He was never in the best of health,” he said softly, but would not look away from the television. It was one of those reality shows; Trish wasn’t sure which one. People yelled at each other quite a bit on those shows—more than she herself had ever experienced, although she knew this was probably normal behavior in some parts of the world. Then someone was voted out of the house, off the island, into the plastic box suspended from a crane, or whatever.

She waited to see if he had more to say, if he needed her comfort in any way. This man had been Martin’s best friend for many years. But Martin had barely reacted—it might as well have been some stranger on the news who died.

Strangeness had been coming into her life for years—now at last it had fully arrived, courtesy of Martin, her husband of twenty-six years. Did men undergo a change of life? Angie once said “The difference between men and women is that men go through a menopause every five years.” Angie was on her third marriage, this time to Harry, a small man who hid part-way behind her at all social occasions.

It was that sense of strangeness that had driven Trish to open a dictionary for the first time in probably ten years. Not even for Scrabble—if she had to look it up it probably wasn’t a word she’d feel comfortable using. The dictionary had been hard to find, pushed to the back of a bottom shelf in a corner of this basement rec room shared by Martin’s big old TV and assorted storage. Not much “rec” had occurred in this house for years, not since Molly had grown up and moved away to a series of eastern towns, none of whose names she could recall.

The top edge of the dictionary had been covered by a thick bed of dust, and curlicues of someone’s long hair—whose she could not imagine. She and Molly had always worn theirs short. Maybe it’s angel hair, she thought, chuckling, scrubbing off the book before daring to open it.

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