Plasmas by Céline Minard

Author:Céline Minard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

1.  A farandole is a type of Provençal dance.

Ricochets

It had touched the surface at the ideal twenty-degree angle. Stabilized by its centrifugal movement, it dug a cavity into the fluid determined by its speed of rotation and translation combined with the water’s viscous resistance and inertial force. It maintained its angle of attack forty-one times in a row until the parameters of impact reached the lower limit beneath which it could only surf, then succumb to gravity and sink.

Forty-one skips!

Garwan leaped from slab to slab to retrieve his stone. He was fired up. He had just beat the last known record for skipping stones and confirmed, through duly recorded experiments, his calculations concerning the variation of the horizontal component of velocity. He laughed openly, plunging his hand into the cool water to seize the stone he had spent entire evenings polishing. His favorite, gray and smooth, barely veined with white, smooth to the touch, warm like skin.

He had gotten it by battling it out during the end-of-year festivities. What he held in the palm of his hand was a pretty trophy, a stone that was local to the region, nearly intact, polished by an authentic terrestrial flood, a shard of legend, a trupebble. He had handled it so often that his fingers positioned themselves instinctively around the rounded edge, the first phalanx of his index finger against the miniscule notch that, like a trigger, was used to imprint the gyratory movement, the arc of the thumb hugging the pebble’s body but remaining flexible, ready to let go at the strongest point of the momentum sent from shoulder to forearm to wrist.

For Garwan, skipping was an art. A branch of applied physics that he liked, but, above all, an art. The number of variables was so large that you needed a brain and a body with a particularly developed sense of finesse to even try to do it. But you needed above all the intimate perception of the moment, absolutely present, when the stone needed to leave the hand and take flight.

The axis, eccentric force, and power were variables that could be acquired and taught, but that decisive intuition, which you either had or didn’t, was the incalculable inspiration, the spark that transformed technique into talent. And Garwan had just experienced it. It had gone through his head and arm like a flash of lightning, a euphoric sensation. He hoped there would be a trace of it in the reference chronofilms, one way or another.

Still skipping, he went back up the slab pathway, shaking his soaked sleeve to spray the water as far away as possible from him, he was ten years old, he felt like his legs were those of a deer or a wasp, he was no longer entirely certain.

The room had returned to stillness since the ripples and circles he had provoked with his magic pebble had been sucked up into the pond’s denseness. Bathed in a zenithal light verging on yellow, devoid of any object beside the slabs

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