How To Live Safely In A Science Fictiona (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
She had finally come back from her sister’s house, pulling up just as my father and I reentered time in the middle of the garage. She was afraid, I could hear it in her voice, how she was on the edge of panic, as she so often was.On the return landing from our maiden voyage, the machine had fallen apart. In fact, it didn’t even make it back to our original starting point, reentering in a ball of heat sometime during the minute we had traveled over. We crash-landed somewhere in that lost minute, which was a good thing, maybe a necessary thing, since it meant that there weren’t two sets of us in existence at that moment, and going forward, but it did confuse things.I didn’t understand it then, but now, watching her from up here, in the minute before we emerged, I see that she’d just gotten back, her sister was dropping her off, and as she struggled to get the broken and mismatched luggage out of the trunk I could see the look on my mom’s face, a look I recognized, half of her terrified of losing control and blowing up at my father, half of her hoping he might, contrary to all previous behavior, be waiting for her with unguarded love in his eyes.What she probably hadn’t been expecting to see was a big hole in the middle of the cement in the garage floor, and half of the tools in the garage singed by a fire our machine had apparently ignited on launch, and most of the ceiling not so much singed as scorched, and a stack of old newspapers in the corner burning a nice, healthy orange flame near cans of old cleaning solution.There she is, falling over her luggage, into the trash cans, screaming for us, wondering where we were, assuming the worst, as she always did, assuming catastrophe, just utter unimaginable worst-case disaster for our family, how in her state of anticipatory panic she had dropped a cake she had bought from the grocery store on the ground and her stocking had a run in it and her hair was a little crazy.And now here we come, my younger self and my dad, our machine blinking into existence, and from this vantage point I can see what I didn’t see the first time, how I look to my mother as she watches me, climbing out of the machine, a little, skinny-armed boy, her boy, I can see how my dad looks to her, still in our device, smiling, and how stupid the machine looks as it falls apart, just as Dad is climbing out.
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