living green | persephone's step-sisters

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. . .

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. . .