Inertia
Susan Woodring
Duncan Jones had thick black lashes and clear blue eyes. His cheeks were fresh pink. He slipped past me at the door and announced he was looking for the lady of the house.
“Is your mother home?” he asked.
I mumbled that she was out back with the bees, and he continued into the house. As he moved across the living room, he paused to touch the papery lampshade on the side table. He fingered the teardrop prism that hung from a string by the window, then glanced at his own reflection in the heavy oak-framed mirror set in the east wall. Duncan was a beautiful boy. He was in the eighth grade, two years older than me, and I was unsure of myself around him. He picked up other things, the ashtray on the coffee table, my grandmother’s Hummel figurines on the mantel. Frowning to himself, he held each item in his hand for a moment, as if to ascertain its weight, before returning each to its spot. I stood watching him, slipping my pop-it bracelet off my wrist, working the pops, slipping it back on again. He cocked his head my way for half a second before he returned to the prism and tried to catch a rainbow, but the sunlight was dulled by thick summer clouds and, after holding it this way and that, Duncan released it, freeing the prism to swing wildly for a few seconds before its arc began to slow and narrow.
“Inertia,” he said. “It’s my favorite force of nature.”
I popped-popped-popped my beads and blew a bubble that stretched thin, broke, and stuck to my hair.
“Mine’s gravity,” I said and collapsed onto the floor. Duncan looked down at me and then away as I lay there, scraping gum off my cheeks. “I love gravity,” I told him, giggling to myself, but he wasn’t listening to me; instead he examined a framed photograph of Chestnut Mountain my mother had taken years before. My grandmother had just started living with us when the picture was taken. She and my mother took turns with the camera, taking shots of the mountains, the river, the doe that stepped out of the woods to drink from the stream, then disappeared back into the woods. Duncan looked deep into the picture and squinted at the far-off, tree-covered peaks.
A moment later, the back door opened and my mother appeared, her face and arms lightly sunburned, her skirt wrinkled and smudged with dirt. Her hair was frizzy from the humidity and her forehead and chin were shiny with sweat. She said hello to Duncan and invited him to sit with her on the sofa. “We’ll all be melting away in this heat,” she said, wiping her face with a handkerchief. She patted down her chest and temples and then, looking down to blot the back of her neck, she frowned at my lying on the floor.
“Lizzie-girl, what’s this?”
I said nothing, only crawled to the chair opposite the sofa and worked my way up, first gripping the legs of the chair, the seat, finally propping my entire self into the chair while my mother sat composed, her back straight and her ankles crossed, ladylike despite her disheveled appearance. Duncan stood digging something out of his pocket.
“Look,” he said, pulling his hand out, fingers closed. He lowered himself onto the couch, next to my mother, turned to face her. “I found it out back behind the railroad tracks.” My mother put on an expression of polite interest while Duncan opened his hand before her, his fingers slowly uncurling to reveal a small black stone.
“Where do you think it came from?” he asked.
My mother put out a finger to touch the rock. She had been a science teacher at the high school before I was born and was still widely known throughout town for her fascination with rocks and other specimens from nature. She would lecture anyone who showed even the smallest interest as to the life cycles of moths and honeybees, the formation of rocks and caves. Duncan had brought her a speck of quartz he’d found last summer on a camping trip with his brothers, and before that, dozens of pressed flowers, a few arrowheads and articles about newly discovered rainforest insects he found in science magazines.
My mother traced the stone’s outer edges, an oblong elliptical shape. Her finger grazed Duncan’s palm. The stone was thin, a largish button without holes. She asked if she could hold it and Duncan nodded, tipping his hand so that it fell into my mother’s palm. She turned it over in her hand, and Duncan remained close, their heads bent over his discovery.
“Do you think it’s from Earth?” Duncan finally asked.
The air in the room was yellow and thick, too cottony to breathe comfortably. I knew what Duncan was hoping. There had been a UFO sighting months earlier in New Mexico, then one just the week before in Montana. Though most people in our town scoffed at these reports, there were some who set out lawn chairs in the evenings and scanned our own skies for the beam of extraterrestrial aircraft. Once, I had a sleepover with a friend whose parents were believers. We were allowed to go out with them. They looked into the vast blankness of space, the stars winking down at them, murmuring to each other about what might descend upon us.
Duncan had brought my mother clippings of both sightings and watched her scan the articles in much the same way he now watched her touch the stone, turning it over and over again in her hand, studying it. She held it between her thumb and index finger, scrutinizing it by the light from the window. She blew gently across the top of the tiny rock and rubbed it between her fingers.
“Is it from the moon?” Duncan asked.
“I think it’s a fragment of an asteroid,” she said after a moment’s pause. She smiled at him. “Or it could possibly be a chink from a far-off planet, sent here by a cosmic storm, a gigantic blast across the galaxy.” She reached for Duncan’s hand, held it palm up, and gently
pressed the stone inside.