Bifocal.

“Mary!” he calls, his big, booming voice projecting through their entire Cape Cod.

“MARY!” he holds out a paper, squeezed between beefy thumb and forefinger, both whorreled with pitch black lines of fingerprints and the creases on his hands. His hands are beefy but paper soft.

“MARY!!!!!!” he screams.

She appears, huffing, in the bedroom door, where he sits at a wooden desk just adjacent, the paper jutting out into the doorframe like an evil seagull hovering in midair.

“Just what is it, Lewis?”

Lewis Sinclair, that’s his name, and Goddamn is he an important guy. The most important founding father down at the meat packing factory.

“Read it!”

She snatches the paper away with a quick, birdlike movement. Mary is not rebellious, but she gets in her hits. And Sinclair feels them.

“Read it.”

“Why?”

“BECAUSE!” He says. Now his big, beefy hands are folded across his chest. He’s leaning back in his chair. His tricorn hat is resting on his head, and his powdered wig sprinkles across his back. The tip of the little pony tale is rubbing his upper back with white chalk.

Mary purses her lips in a way that makes her look like an angry duck, and she pulls the paper close to her face. She has always had trouble reading, not because of lack of smarts with her private tutors as a child, but because she is near-sighted and her parents could never afford or at least never seem to get right the right kind of glasses.

Bifocals.

DEAR MARY,

the paper reads…

I WANT A DIVORCE. NOW!

Then below that…

Sincerely,

Lewis Sinclair. Founding Father.

Mary stares at it, her eyes gone all dusky.

“So this is what you’ve been writing all morning, is it?” she asks. “A polemic?!”

He still has his hands crossed. He nods. His flared nostrils, flared with pleasure, are the only indicators that he’s enjoying himself.

“Well, Sinclair, here’s what I think of that.”

And Mary neatly rips the paper down the middle.

In seconds, the front two feet of Sinclair’s chair have slammed back against the ground. “You wouldn’t dare. You shouldn’t have dared. Mary, you ignorant slut!”

She gazes at him, eyes still mellow. “And you’re an officious oversized prick, more lengthwise than ye art long, Lewis Sinclair!”

And with that she sails back to the kitchen.

Sinclair sits, gawping. His paper, his lovely, well-written, morning page lies torn in two upon the flags. He gets up and picks up both sides of the paper, fuming. Then he stuffs them in his pocket.

If only his father hadn’t forced him to marry her. He could be anywhere now. He could be in Timbuktu. He could be in Paris, palling around with Benjamin Franklin. He could be riding a horse.

Fuming and mobilizing his massive thighs Lewis Sinclair begins to rumble through the house. The house shakes with every step.

“Mary you have emasculated me for the last time! Ye have ripped my paper, the very bosom baby of my brain, my very bobbins. Mary! MARY!”

But Mary cannot hear. She’s in the kitchen cooking a poison pie. And she knows just where to stick it.

She’s gonna stick it in his nasty craw and then shove whatever leftovers remain up his founding father ass. And he’s gonna like it.

Mary grins.

Mary wins.

Mary…sins.

Si?

No.

Porque?

Okay.

Parqué?

Go.

Honoré Daumier – The Past, The Present, The Future – 1834

Gas Station.

The night outside the car was blue-black.

Winston was riding in the back seat, his feet crushed under him, his knees folded up, his forehead pressed against the cold glass. He was staring at the stars as his father drove the car.

They’d just seen a movie. It had been a scary movie, but not that scary. More mysterious. It was a movie about space, and the creatures who came from there, and this weird way they could fold their knees backward and then jump to the top of buildings. Like many movies, it had ended with a confrontation on top of a tall building, and a gun passing back and forth between faces, and someone falling, and someone living. He couldn’t quite remember, it had been a blur.

When the car went over bumps Winston’s head tapped gently against the window, a little painful, but it felt good. The dark silhouettes of trees passed, 1, 2, 3, speeding into the past behind them, and headlights illuminated the back seat like a lighthouse slowly turning.

The movie hadn’t been scary, but it had been…how could he put this…it wasn’t a simple concept. It had been mind – expanding. It had made Winston feel mysterious, and like the world was mysterious. Women and buildings and darkness and sex and rooms and alleys and mysteries and conspiracies and aliens who looked like people but then they bent their knees the wrong way and jumped up into the air.

Mysterious like the stars. Mysterious as the tops of those dark, blue trees.

What’s in that forest, Winston wondered, as the car drove. Who’s in those other cars, with the light passing over and over my face? His dad was in the driver seat, hairy knuckles around the driving wheel, a comforting presence. Who’s in those other cars?

“We just have to make a quick pit-stop, okay, Winny?”

“Ok,” Winston said, still watching the stars zoom overhead.

“We’re just going to a gas station.”

“Ok.”

As his father pulled off the road, the comforting sound of the blinker click click click, the gentle sway of gravity as the car turned. Trees high over the roof of the car and a ceiling of dark blue, little pinpricks punched in it with a hole punch or ice pick or …

“I’ll be right back, Winny,” said Dad, turning in his seat and clapping a hand on Winston’s knee. “It will only be a minute.” He squeezed Winston’s knee, got out of the car, and slammed the door. Off he went, his jaunty walk towards the lighted front of the gas station shop. Behind the station, those dark blue trees were men in hoods that bent over the little clearing, illuminated by the lights of all the cars going by, one, two, three…

Winston sat in the car.

Winston’s dad smelled like bananas and cologne, and he liked to eat those funny candies that were shaped like big peanuts but tasted like some kind of taffy. They tasted like bananas. His dad also ate Power Bars flavored like bananas, and the car was full of their wrappers.

Suddenly bright, white light flashed into Winston’s face. Strange lights, lights within lights, bright lights, were coming down over the darkened trees and spinning, spinning overhead while Winston’s breath caught and he scrambled up onto the seat and clutched his shirt in both hands.

“Ja-heezus CHRIST!”

The lights were swirling. They were coming closer. Winston could see his dad in the gas station through the large window, standing by the cash register, joking with the man. Winston turned away to look at the lights overhead and when he looked back his dad was gone and so was the guy, where had they gone?

Winston looked up again, the swirling lights were low over the gas station, too bright to reveal what was making them. Winston couldn’t see a craft or ship, just patterns like a thin ring around a central illumination, four of those, and then countless others high above. It was the big alien invasion, just like Independence Day! Winston and the rest of the world were going to be obliterated. So was his dad. He had to warn him. He opened the car door and the alarm went off.

The bleeping sound scared Winston and he threw himself back against the seat and slammed the door tight.

When he checked over his shoulder towards the woods across the parking lot, he saw a face.

It was a thin face with no nose and big, big eyes. The mouth was nothing but a thin line but it seemed to cut the face in half. Winston couldn’t quite see the circumference of the face, the shadows were covering it, but he could tell it was big. A big, moon-shaped face. The eyes had little pinpricks of light at their very center, and a ring of light around them. Moon eyes.

And then the door was wrenched open behind Winston and he screamed.

Aftershave and bananas plugged Winston’s nose. He was in his dad’s arms, straddling his chest and his face on his dad’s shoulder, crying. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” said his dad.

Winston looked up and through his tears he saw the lights were gone – no lights, no ships. He looked around. Only the gas station. He peered into the woods over the roof of the car.

“What are you looking for, Win? What is it?”

Winston looked back at his dad, whose face was locked in a wild-eyed grimace.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t open the door, Win! It sets the car alarm off.”

Don’t alarm the car then, Winston thought. But he mostly thought about that face.

“There were lights. There were lights above the gas station!”

Winston’s dad looked up. There were only stars up there, millions of them. He squeezed Winston tight. Bananas filled Winston’s nose. “You got a bit scared, huh?”

— Winston’s dad said.

Winston nodded into his shoulders. “They were there. Flying saucers.”

Winston’s dad laughed, not cruelly. He caressed the back of Winston’s head. Then he carried him around the car to the passenger seat in the front. “Why don’t you sit up here?”

Winston nodded. His dad deposited him in the seat. Then he walked around the car and got in the driver’s side. As he was walking around, Winston gazed into the trees opposite the gas station. There was nothing in there. Or was there…? Two pinpricks of light, way back in the trees?

No.

And then his dad turned on the car. And Vivaldi overtook the airwaves. And his dad floated out of the parking lot.

“That movie scared you a little bit, huh, champ?” Winston’s dad said.

“Yeah,” said Winston.

“A little bit.”

Theodore Kittelsen – The Black Death – c. 1904