fire in the night

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Cynthia G.

OIL IN WATER

a novel by

PAM LAZOS

CHAPTER TWO (c)

Kori screamed and scrambled over the console into the back seat, squishing in with her brothers. ZiZi yelped and Kori screamed again. She was wide-eyed with terror, yet put a protective arm around Gil.

“What the hell!” Avery said, staring in amazement. Several dogs began barking. The neighbor’s car alarm, activated by the blast, began its cycle of warning. Porch lights flooded the darkness. A small blaze started on the porch, its flames licking delicately at the tattered Venetian blinds partially emerging from the broken windows.

“Our porch is on fire.” Avery said, fumbling through Kori’s purse for the cell phone. “We gotta call the fire department.” He found the phone and pushed the “on” button. Kori shook her head and grabbed the phone.

“No. We gotta call Mom and Dad,” she said. Her hands were shaking.

“Mom and Dad are in Philly. We gotta call the fire department. Otherwise it’s going to be more screwed up.” Avery grabbed the phone out of Kori’s hand. She put her hand on top of his and there they sat, locked together in a game of push me, pull you.

“Avery. We gotta call Mom and Dad!” Kori yanked the phone from Avery’s hand. He pulled it back before she had a chance to dial the first number.

Aunt Stella’s garage lights flicked on and the Tirabis watched as Aunt Stella’s stout frame, adorned in robe and slippers, lumbered across the front lawn at full throttle.

“Mmmmmm, cookies,” Gil mused.

Aunt Stella’s pudgy, round face peered in through the back window where the kids huddled together like war orphans. She opened the door, pushed the driver’s seat forward, and thrust a hand inside. Kori grabbed it and Aunt Stella yanked them out one by one.

“Are you alright? What are you doing in the car? Thank God you weren’t inside!” Aunt Stella looked at Gil who still had tissues sticking out of his ears. “What happened?” she yipped. “Did an experiment go bad or something?”

All three of them started talking at once which instigated a round of ZiZi’s agitated barking. Aunt Stella waved her hands in the air, the international symbol for enough already, and gathered them together like a head coach at halftime.

“Alright. It’ll be okay. Let’s go inside,” she said. “I already called the fire department.”

As if on cue, a fire truck screamed down the road. Everyone turned to watch as the massive vehicle docked on the Tirabi lawn. A second truck could be heard off in the distance, sirens blaring.

Aunt Stella sighed. Four firemen alighted from the truck and began assembling the hoses, their yellow emergency vests glinting in the fire light.

“Mom and Dad are in Philly,” Kori continued, her voice cracking from the strain.

“I know. Your mother called me this morning.”

Aunt Stella placed a large arm around Kori’s shoulder and held fast to Gil’s wrist with her other hand. Flames licked the front of the house. The double-wide porch swing, made of wood, canvass and macrame, crackled and spat and danced in the darkness, spitting bits of light in wide arcs over the railing. The fire chief shouted several commands and the fireman trained their hoses on the light.

“Come. They’ll soon have it under control. Robbie will know where to go.” She steered Gil and Kori in the direction of the house without releasing them. “Let’s try and call your parents.” Kori shot Avery a look and wrinkled her nose at him.

They walked across the lawn, ZiZi bringing up the rear. Aunt Stella pushed a reluctant Gil into the house.

Avery stood alone on the front stoop, mesmerized. Flames darted about the porch leaving a crackling trail of blazed, scorched wood. The macrame seat on the porch swing – Avery’s favorite reading chair – looked like a million writhing snakes. Avery grimaced as the acrid smell of burning memories reached his nostrils. He stood immobilized, clutching Kori’s cell phone, anguish pouring from him like water from a hose.

Aunt Stella popped out and grabbed Avery by the arm. “C’mon, baby, there’s nothing to be done right now. And I don’t want you having nightmares.”

Avery swiped at his eyes and followed Aunt Stella inside.

to be continued. . .

second sight

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Cynthia G.

OIL IN WATER

PAM LAZOS

CHAPTER TWO (a)

Avery washed the dinner dishes while Kori sat at the table, sketching.

“The rule is, he who cooks does not clean up. That is the rule. And frankly, I’m flabbergasted to hear that you’ve never heard of it,” Avery said. “My advice? Find a guy with plenty of money cause you don’t know the first thing about work, sister.”

Tall and sinewy with inches still to go, Avery had his mother’s good looks and a healthy dose of her wavy, red hair. At sixteen, he towered above his sister, destined to be not only the tallest, but most loquacious one in the family.

“Hey, jabber jaws. Easy. I’m trying to work here,” Kori replied. She stood up, grabbed her eraser and dropped back into the chair, her shoulder length hair flouncing around her like the head of Medusa, dark, coppery strands writhing and whirling in all directions. Kori was older by five years, but looked younger than her brother. She stopped to admire her long slender fingers under the pretense of inspecting her fingernails for paint residue.

“Work? That’s not work. That’s fun. This is work.” Avery pointed to the mound of dishes awaiting rinsing and placement in the dishwasher.

“Hey, we could have had pizza.”

“Ingrate.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I cook and clean up,” Kori said.

“For yourself, yeah. But other people live here, too.”

“Robbie ate your food and he didn’t do any cleanup.”

“Robbie gets special treatment. He’s taking me to see Tom Petty this weekend.”

“Tom Petty? Jesus, Avery. He’s so old.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not still good. It’s better than that classical crap you listen to.”

Kori shook her head. “You’re a cheap date.”

“And you’re just cheap.”

Avery fixed her with a top-that look, but it was useless. She was her father’s only daughter, blessed with grace and beauty from birth; Kori was used to entitlement. She rolled her eyes and picked at her cuticles.

Avery put the last dish in the dishwasher. “Let me just repeat – Big Fat Checking Account.”

“I’m making my own money now.”

“What, hawking second-rate oil paintings?” Avery said.

“They are not second-rate. What’s second-rate is your attempts at dating.”

“You suck.” He threw a dishtowel at her and stormed out of the room, still fuming when he sat down next to Gil in the living room.

“What a b. . . .”

“Ssshhhhh,” Gil said, covering Avery’s mouth. Gil rocked back and forth, his narrow shoulders bouncing off the couch at two-second intervals. At almost eleven, he still maintained the little boy looks that would soon be lost to puberty. He removed his hand from Avery’s mouth and drew it very deliberately across his forehead, anchoring his Justin Bieber haircut in just below his eyebrows.

Avery huffed, crossed his legs and practiced some deep breathing exercises. After a minute, he forgot all about Kori and engrossed himself in the final scenes of Die Hard. He didn’t notice Gil walk to the dining room table, roll up a stack of blueprints and stuff them into a cylinder. Nor did he notice Gil retrieving their shoes from the hall closet.

Gil placed Avery’s shoes at his feet and sat down to put on his own. “The bad guys are coming,” Gil said.

“It would appear so,” Avery said, his attention focused on the television screen.

“We have to go.”

“Hmmm?” Avery turned to see Gil slipping into his sneakers. “Gil, it’s only a movie.”

Gil picked up Avery’s shoes and handed them to him before turning off the television.

“What are you doing?” Gil scooped up the cylinder and Kori’s shoes and walked into the kitchen. Avery slipped on his shoes and followed.

Gil laid Kori’s shoes at her feet.

“What are these for?” Kori asked.

“We have to leave,” Gil said.

“Why?”

“The bad guys are coming.”

“What bad guys?”

“The bad guys on T.V.,” Avery answered for him. “C’mon, Gil. Let’s watch the end of the movie.”

“Yeah. Take a chill pill,” Kori said.

“We have to leave NOW!”

Avery and Kori both jumped. Gil covered his own mouth. His siblings exchanged glances.

“Okay, okay,” Avery said. He grabbed the car keys. “I’m driving.”

Kori slipped her feet into her sandals and swiped the keys from Avery.

“I have my permit!” he protested.

“Your learner’s permit only allows you to drive during daylight hours.” She opened the door to the pitch black night, put a hand on her hip.

“You suck.”

“That’s the second time you said that tonight.” Kori blew him a kiss and held the door for Gil and ZiZi, the family Golden Retriever, and closed the door on her brother.

to be continued. . .

the mother of invention

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Cynthia G.

OIL IN WATER

PAM LAZOS

CHAPTER ONE (b)

Marty stopped and laid his face against the side of the metal grate. It was cool to the touch and not at all indicative of the processes going on inside. He shook his head and started his hop, skip and jump dance all over again, this time adding an ecstatic laugh to the mix.

He’d done it. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, he’d brought the beast to life: his Thermo-Depolymerization Unit, or TDU, lived – years in the making, like nothing the world had ever seen, and until five minutes ago, only a theory. Marty had envisioned that the TDU would take garbage, computers, old sneakers, last night’s dinner, yard waste, old fence posts, plastic tupperware, with or without lids, old sweatshirts, used ball point pens, broken picture frames, old love letters, paint waste, empty cardboard boxes, broken refrigerators, busted telephone poles, wrecked car parts, or the whole car for that matter, old comic books, unwanted furniture, hell, this machine could take anything carbon-based, and do something magical with it, something that, to date, no one else had figured out how to do – take trash, and convert it into oil – pure, unadulterated, car-starting, engine-revving, turbo-driving, eighteen-wheeler-moving oil. Marty figured that the TDU would mimic what Mother Nature did every day hundreds of miles below the earth’s surface: break down fossils into fuels. But Marty’s contraption would take about three hours instead of millions of years, combusting nothing, and leaving no waste. After twenty years of toil, Marty’d had his share of false starts. But now the whir and hum of booster pumps and coolant fan units was evidence: modern-day alchemy. Marty had called down the vision.

But the world had no template for it. Like the shaman of the first American Indian tribe to come into contact with Columbus, Marty had to mold the vision into a discernible shape, give the people something palpable that they could recognize. For even as Columbus’s ships approached the shores of the New World, the Indians couldn’t see them, not until their shaman provided them with a frame of reference.

But being a shaman was at times an exhausting, aching and lonely occupation. So Marty did what any man in his place would do when faced with a discovery of unrivaled proportions. He propped himself up on the hammock in the corner of the barn and took a nap.

to be continued. . .

Eureka

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Cynthia G.

OIL IN WATER

PAM LAZOS

Chapter One

Marty Tirabi sat on a stool aside his drafting table, an aluminum pie plate in each hand. His eyes were closed, his spine erect, his breathing slow and regular, his conscious mind sitting on the pinnacle of present awareness. At the exact moment Marty’s consciousness shifted, sliding across the threshold from beta to alpha to delta like a single-base hitter stealing home, Marty’s grip slackened and the pie plates clattered to the floor. He woke with a start and stared, wide-eyed, at the back wall of the barn where It sat, all the while scanning his interior databases for a revelation that refused to be retrieved.

Marty rubbed his forehead. This was how Thomas Edison did it, mining the gem-rich ground of his subconscious by bringing himself to the brink of sleep, then pulling back with a start for a third-party observer’s view. The result of Edison’s efforts was the light bulb and one thousand and ninety-two other patented inventions, but Marty’d be damned if he could get Edison’s process to work. For him, it was just there, a vision that sometimes crept, sometimes hurtled from unconscious to conscious awareness – claircognizance some called it, a simple knowing – and suddenly Marty would know how to pull it all together.

But not tonight. Frustrated, Marty spun his stool around, laid the pie plates and his overtired brain on the drafting table, and stared at his father’s oil lamp, its soft, incandescent glow casting ectoplasmic shadows on the blueprints beneath his head. He started to fall – no aluminum to stop him this time – but was halted at the threshold again.

A faint hum jarred him back, a soft, deliberate noise like the whir of a refrigerator motor or the patter of a soft rain. He felt it in his feet first. It climbed up his legs as it grew in intensity, settled in his heart, and then shot up to his forehead. His head vibrated. Marty rose slowly so as not to disturb the hum’s cadence and strolled across the barn floor toward the back wall, convinced that a nonchalant attitude was imperative to the hum’s survival. He tried not to smile, tried not to look directly at It until he had stopped in front of the thousands of pounds of steel assembled in six distinct units. He sniffed the air. Dozens of smells slid past the cilia in his nose and traveled along his olfactory nerve, stopping at the cerebral cortex to register: methane, plastic, burning rubber, decay, ash. Even in a closed-looped system, the vapors, like his dreams, always escaped.

And then, suspended in the air like dust motes lollygagging in a single ray of sun, the smell of oil, sharp, sweet and slightly acrid, knocked on the registrar’s door, tap, tap, tap, piercing Marty’s nasal cavity and shattering his equilibrium.

“Hahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Marty clapped his hands and because he was half-Greek, did the only dance he felt comfortable doing, a little hop/skip combo that was the backbone of most traditional ethnic dances. He repeated the steps over and over until he came full circle. He added a little jump to his combination. The word Eureka came to mind.

to be continued. . .