The February Selected Writer is Timothy Wilkie
Please feel free to email Timothy at: timwilkie06@gmail.com
THE FLAW
by Timothy Wilkie
Thou hast wept to know
That things depart
Which never may return
—Percy Shelley to William Wordsworth
Thunder boomed and lightening streaked across the desert sky. The air was thick, steamy, and ripe for rain.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Janet closed the tool drawer and looked up at the sky. Something had been wreaking havoc with the signal from the relay tower. Home base sent her to check it out, but so far she found nothing to explain the disturbance. To say she was a bit annoyed would be a huge understatement.
She saw a shadow move along the ground and looked up to see the largest vulture she had ever seen. Suddenly it plummeted from the sky. Its wings flapped uselessly as if the desert sand was sucking it down. It thudded into the ground less than a hundred feet. It was completely still by the time she could get to it. She moved it with her foot and was repulsed…it was an evil, disgusting-looking creature.
Turning away from the dead bird, she went to her truck. Her face felt hot and she looked in the rear-view mirror to confirm what she already knew: she was going to have a nasty sunburn. She opened up her thermos and took a swallow of the sun tea she had filled it with in the morning before leaving the house. Gary was always nagging her for putting too much sugar in it. If he didn’t like it then he didn’t have to drink it.
A slight pain in her stomach quickly ripened into full-blown nausea. Her head felt weird and she had goose bumps all up and down her arms. She shivered and slid down low in the truck seat, trying to relax. Ten minutes later, feeling a little better, it was time to head for home.
In the desert there is no dusk; it simply changes from day to night. So when she pulled into the gas station in Cave Creek fifteen minutes later, it was already dark. She took a deep breath and thought, I’m okay. Maybe it was just a little too much sun today.
Finally home, she found Gary once again sitting in front of the TV. He motioned her to come over and sit beside him “Come-mere,” he said, “I’ve missed you.”
She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. They needed to talk, but this wasn’t the time. “I’ve got a sunburn and I may be coming down with something. I’m just going to grab a shower and crawl into bed.”
He raised his eyebrows and then continued watching TV without another word. She knew he was pissed, but she didn’t care anymore enough was enough.
*****
“Damn it!” Peter Carson muttered. He tapped his fingers impatiently on the console of his computer. “It’s back; we’re getting that energy drain again. Something is going on in the desert.”
No one was in the room to hear him. He didn’t know exactly who he had been talking to, or what was happening but he feared that it was far more involved than just an interruption in their cable feed; sunspots or some other nonsense.
He had been monitoring the feed all night. He spent four years at ASU getting a degree in Mass
Communications, so how come he was feeling like a useless piece of shit?
Peter looked at the report he had just written, barely recognizing his own words:
Augmented by reality, it expands at a tremendous rate, a rate unknown since the starting of the universe itself. If it were to have a name it would be called, “The Little Bang.” On a subatomic level it has already expanded to a million times its original size in less than a second. Yet it is still too small to be detected by the human eye. It is absorbing the power of everything around it just to be, and it still isn’t enough. It requires huge amounts of energy just to exist at all. It greedily gobbles up more and more.
He picked up his phone and called his supervisor at home.
“I know she's been trained to do it,” Peter said into the phone. He shook his head ‘no’ as if his supervisor Larry could see him over the phone. He took a moment to listen, then yelled, “Janet’s missing it!”
He hung up and swallowed his anger with a ham sandwich that he dug out of the fridge. As he ate, he formulated a plan that was plain and simple. If the company wouldn’t listen to him, then he would go out to the desert and figure this thing out himself. But he needed some help.
He left the office and took the Bush Highway straight to Cave Creek. By the time he got to Janet’s house, it looked as though there was a storm brewing over the desert skies. A gusty wind was blowing and there was sand and dust everywhere. Huge balls of tumbleweed skittered across the road in front of his truck, and more than once he had to stomp on his brakes to avoid hitting one.
Peter noticed that the sky seemed full of vultures.
*****
Her face burned. She swallowed a sob, for fear of waking Gary sleeping next to her. She didn’t want to share her fear or pain with him. She didn’t want to show him any weakness. She had to be the strong
one. He was so fragile he might break. She felt like his mother, not his girl friend.
Bile rose in her throat and she swallowed it, the vomit burning in her stomach. The room only had one
light and that spilled over from the bathroom. There were two windows, they were closed and latched with the curtains drawn tight, just the way Gary liked it. He was afraid someone might break in.
She felt like she was burning up. She carefully got out of bed, and then suddenly her situation became much more urgent. She made a mad dash for the bathroom and almost made it.
Gary was there suddenly, watching her clean puke off the floor. “Damn it!” He cursed. Without another word, he left the bathroom and Janet was relieved. She went through the bedroom into the living room. The thought of going back to sleep repulsed her so she stared out the window into the night still haunted by the day.
She knew something was going on in the desert. Something out there made her sick.
A knock on the door startled her. She groaned as she got out of the old recliner in the living-room and was even more startled to see her boss standing on her front porch.
“This morning…” Peter started.
“Won’t you come in?” Janet interrupted him. “The house is a mess. Let me get dressed. Wait in the living room.”
“Okay by me,” Peter said. “I’m going to be joining you when you go to the desert today. It’ll be light outside in a half an hour, so we can get started now.”
She hesitated, then went upstairs to get dressed.
When she returned, Peter, as always, got straight to the point. “What did you get from the desert yesterday?”
Janet replied, “A sunburn.” When she saw his expression, she hastily added, “The truth is, I don’t know. I can only tell you that whole relay system out there has been drained of power. Nothing is working.”
“How is that possible?”
“It isn’t.”
A half hour later, the desert spread out flat in all directions and Peter and Janet were stuck in a sandstorm. Inside the truck it was dark, the sun blotted out by the dust.
“I guess it never rained, unless you count dust,” Janet said.
The dust storm was terrifying, and growing more intense by the second. Peter did exactly what the Arizona Department of Public Safety suggested: he pulled over to the side of the dirt road and prayed that no one would rear end them. They had no choice but to ride this one out and hope for the best.
They both jumped in their seats as a dead vulture blew against the windshield, making a thudding sound before it slipped off the truck to the ground.
Meanwhile, the thing in the desert attempted to quench a never-ending thirst, greedily drinking in all the energy around it, and growing at a frightening rate. The very fabric of the universe had parted and allowed the transverse transfusion of one living membrane into another.
It was a flaw in the natural law of the world.
*****
The truck rocked back and forth, and the wind howled around them like an angry beast. Above the sound of the wind there was another sound: an eerie kind of whining, so high-pitched that it hurt their ears. They had no idea what it was.
Peter put his one hand flat on the side window. He could feel the strength of the wind raging outside. A lightning bolt lit up the cab of the truck for an instant. Outside, an incredible series of lightning and over-lapping thunder claps continued on.
A thunder storm in the middle of a sand storm? What’s next? Peter thought.
Suddenly, a massive gust of sand and wind hit the side of the truck and it went up on two wheels. Janet
cried out, her fists clenched tight. When the truck righted itself, even Peter’s face was blanched white.
Finally the sandstorm seemed to subside. “Think we can go out now?” Peter asked.
“We need to get this over with,” Janet said.
The power of the sand and wind had been so intense that it had sanded almost all the painted letters off the government truck.
“Look!” Janet said, pointing to a tiny dot, but when the sun peeked out from under the clouds, it was gone.
“No service out here,” Peter said. “Try your phone; mine’s dead. There should be service out here.”
“My phone’s dead, too.”
The sun was shining brightly after the dust storm and it was getting hotter by the minute.
Suddenly they felt a presence of something new. They heard a high-pitched sound, almost like a humming on an ultra-sonic level.
“It’s here,” Peter said. “I swear I never believe it could be real. But it’s here.”
“What’s here?” Janet asked in alarm.
“I call it The Little Bang. Oh my god, it eats energy. It’s been killing the vultures, and now it wants us. We have to get out of here!”
“But what…” she began.
“People exude energy!” he cried. “Get back in the truck! We need to get out of here!”
They both made a dash for the truck. Janet grabbed Peter’s arm before he could start the engine.
“What are you doing?” he said as he jerked his arm away.
“Peter, if we go home, we’ll lead this thing right into Phoenix. All those people will be killed and The Little Bang will just get stronger.”
“What else can we do?”
She looked at him and shook her head. When she spoke, her voice was calm. “In front of us, there’s nothing but desert. Just drive.”
Timothy Wilkie is a musician/writer living in the Catskill Mountains of New York. He has two grown sons, Justin and Blake Wilkie. He keeps busy by playing music in Woodstock New York, and writing and painting in the beautiful solitude of the Catskill Mountains.
He has traveled extensively, but is never happier then when he is with his sons or working on a new plotline.