In Which the Boy Fails

The boy was wrong, as he had been before and would be again, the endless cycle of failure always seeming to run its course around him- a horse race that he bet on endlessly, over and over, and always lost.

This time was worse though.

“What do you mean the orange button?” he asked tenatively.

He had pushed a button, and it was orange, but the klaxons had started up along with the lights and it didn't really seem to be the signature of success. The boy kept his face contritional as he stood in front of the console, but his hands were fidgity, and he ran his thumbs across themselves in a constant nervous motion.

“I meant the orange button, what do you think I meant? The hell did you do?” Karen said, the patience she had been trying to muster failing entirely. “I mean, Jesus Christ, what did you do?”

To be fair to all parties, orange is a word that could possibly describe a great variety of shades, from saffron to red-orange, but this was the boy, and the boy will be wrong, so of course the orange button was not the orange button he thought it was.

The correct button was what might be referred to as tangerine yellow. The boy's choice had been a safety orange.

Karen shoved the boy aside and sat in the chair. The console was wide, wide enough that one would have to lean over and stretch out to hit the farthest buttons and levers, a designer fault that was corrected in later models, but Station Seventeen was long overdue for an update. She began typing furiously with one hand, reaching out to strike buttons that to the boy's untrained eyes appeared as random as the toss of a die.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Karen didn't bother to turn around. “You can shut up and stand aside.”

So he stood and he watched, as Karen worked as quickly as she could.

“Which button did you push?

The boy ran his eyes along the rows, but could only reply with “The orange one.”

Karen muttered something coarse under her breath, but whatever extended curse she had begun was cut short by cold tones of the Station's computer. A hologram blinked into existence above the two of them, big imposing numbers, and both were silent.

“Fifteen seconds.”

Karen spun the chair around and stared directly at the boy. “What. Button. Did. You. Push.”

“Um.”

“Ten seconds.”

“Think.”

The boy thought as hard as he could, the glow of the hologram painting his face a sickly shade, but (“Five seconds”) nothing was coming up but orange. He shrugged, a small pathetic gesture, the last thing he would ever manage to screw up.

Karen looked at him, her face in a dangerous calm and her eyes ablaze. “Are you serious?”

There was no noise, but the light from the station's explosion lit the terrestrial sky, a bright plume of white that burned into a slow yellow fire, a fire that might best be described as a mellow light of golden poppy.

In Which Gerald is Not Sure How to Feel

There had been no one in the house, thank God, when the letter bomb had exploded, but Gerald didn’t feel anything resembling relief as he stood outside of the building, watching scattered papers and sparks drift out of the shattered window where his room had been. He felt, in fact, quite the opposite. He felt a looming sort of dread, not at all glad that he had in fact avoided the explosion, instead feeling like perhaps he would have been better off, no, should have been better off, in his room, spread out across the walls and floor as an ashen smudge to be later collected and disposed of.

The package had arrived about an hour earlier with no return address and a name only superficially resembling his own, but the phone had rung so Gerald had grabbed a cigarette and left, standing out on the sidewalk and pacing. It was his girlfriend, Susan, and she had called and said hello with the uncomfortable gravity that a speaker takes before saying something truly overwhelming.

“Hello Gerald.” Susie had said.

“Oh God,” Gerald had replied, and then a noise like nothing either of them had ever heard, like a team of trucks all colliding head on like an asterisk, or maybe like a safe, falling from some great distance through a long series of plate glass windows. Gerald had been thrown off of his feet and yet somehow the cell phone landed next to his head so he could hear Susan say, her voice the very encyclopedic example of bewilderment, “What the hell was that?!”

Gerald took the phone up, still lying prone on the ground. He ignored his injuries as best he could. (His estimation: one twisted ankle, two, maybe three broken ribs. Numerous cuts and bruises.) “Susie,” said Gerald. “I think my apartment just exploded.”

In a rush to say her piece, Susan either didn’t hear or simply ignored his words. “I’m breaking up with you.”

Gerald paused, unsure of what to say, and then repeated himself. “Susie,” he said. “I think my apartment just exploded.”

“What?”

“My apartment. It- it exploded.” He suddenly felt very ridiculous and unsure of how to continue, tried to further emphasize his point, saying “As in, like… boom.”

She said nothing in response, but Gerald could hear low, throaty noises and the tiniest sounds he imagined was the sound of her grinding her teeth. He thought about how her face scrunched up when she was angry, how her eyebrows remained level as her eyes squinted, the mouth a thin line below. He imagined she was doing the little twitchy thing she did with the corner of her lips that he found extremely cute for no reason apparent to him and had learned to never mention.

Susie hung up the phone, and Gerald, lying on the ground, gave it a look of utter and complete confusion before shutting the clamshell with an audible click.

He didn’t get up, choosing instead to continue lying on the ground as the breeze scattered ash and soot around him.