The Tortoise Cup

The Tortoise Cup

Fran stood in her sewing room surrounded by partially unpacked moving boxes. Well, sewing room was a working title, but it was her room, a place she would want to spread out and DO things. It was a “sewing room” because that’s all she really had done in it. She was working on Julie’s brides maid dress for the wedding. It was January, the windows were frosted as they get after a couple months of winter in Minnesota. The sun was shining in the window waking up the dust in it’s path into a sparkling lazy afternoon dance.

Fran didn’t notice all this. Her eyes were fixed in space. About three feet from her crossed squinting eyes and the sound of her rapid shallow breathing there was nothing.

But there should have been. There had been. 10 seconds before she had started to smile at her ‘weird’ mid 50ish hubby. There he was. With his robe on inside out, his guitar slung over his back and he was gingerly placing his old antique bifocals on upside down.

Right in mid giggle her heart dropped to her knees. She was afraid to move. “Sammy?” she whispered.

Mrs. Samuel W. Munson sounded so official. She had dreamed of being married since she was little. Her father, Clyde Showers, had been a hard working man all his life, a teamster back in their more organized crime years and as Fran grew up a railroader. A rough man with a gentle heart, she dreamed of sharing her life with someone just like her daddy.

The years had grown into decades and hope slipped into sadness, but never bitterness. Just a background sense of what might have been, but no regrets. Ha! The times the tears filled her eyes when another roommate walked down the aisle with her standing by as maid of honor were always tempered by the pain of some of those same roommates abused or rejected mere years later. No, waiting was worth it, regardless of the cost.

Not that she sat around as an old maid. No way! She and her brother always joked about "Fran’s Orphanage" because all she really loved to do was children. “Now you listen to me!" Her daddy would say to her years after she had moved out. "You’ve changed more lives playing with those children of yours than a 100 parents could have done."

And she had. First it was baby sitting and even before she moved out and got her degree in Kinesiology (“Cubs Baseball” her brother would always chide) she was nannying for families in the west Chicago area. It was about her 6th nanny job where she go the wild idea of really doing an orphanage. She had read about George Mueller in England and one thing led to another.

It stared with a halfway house (half a duplex) and working with foster care of the State of Illinois, but soon she became far too busy rescuing inner city kids. By the time she had met Sammy there were 6 homes in the suburban area and two camps in Wisconsin.

Where did that come from? Why was she thinking of that now? What just happened? And “Where are you, Sammy?”, she whispered a second time, refocusing on the air three feet away.

“Whoa!” she gasped and stepped back as he reappeared just to the left of where he had vanished.

“Whoa!” Sammy said as he leaned back to look at the glasses he was holding in his hands upside down.

“Where did you go?” she said with more anger than she felt. She could feel something beating in her chest, pressing against her flesh. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing! What’s wrong with you? You just froze. You didn’t move. I couldn’t get you to hear me you just sat there, solid and immovable.”

“Ouch! My arm hurts. Gee it’s sore.”

“Yeah, that’s where I tried to move it, but it felt funny, even though it was paralyzed, so I kind of freaked out.”

“YOU freaked out? YOU disappeared!!! Where did you go???”

“NO where. That’s what I said. I’ve been here for the whole last two hours.”

“Sammy,” Fran whispered, “It’s only been a minute. And you’ve got to believe me. You were gone. I was looking right here.” Fran waved her hand where he had been standing and vanished. “And you’ve got to believe me, you just vanished.”

“I what?”

“You disappeared. I couldn’t see you. You weren’t in the room.”

“You smell something?”

“What? NO! . . . yeah! Like something burning.”

“Yeah you remember that paper from my aunt?”

“Yes. It was right here where we were sitting.” She looked down, there were ashes on the floor still smoking.

“Oh, my! What happened Sammy?”

“Don’t touch anything!”

“OK, what?”

“Here, put these glasses on upside down.”

“Uh . . . what?”

“Just try this…”

“No, Sammy, I don’t want to.”

“It will be OK, but you’ve got to promise me. Once I get this on you, do ONLY what I ask you to do, OK?”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“Fran, just trust me for a minute. I’ve got to find something out.”

“OK, but I’m scared.”

“I’m scared too, but I’ve got to find something out before we do anything else. First, let’s go out into the garage.”

Fran and Sammy’s garage was one of those old Minnesota single car garages that when your car was parked in it, there was only room to hang things on the walls and in the rafters. Their's was better than most because it was attached to the house and a previous owner had insulated it and ran the duct work through the attic so it was heated.

Fran walked through the kitchen and stepped down to the concrete floor of the tiny garage, with the few remaining unpacked boxes lined up along the side under the single window facing the neighbors. One of Sammy’s goals for this weekend was to either unpack or move those boxes to the plywood sheets laying on the rafters and finally park their Corolla inside.

But neither of them thought about that now. Fran stood with the glasses on upside down and the robe draped on her inside out, Sammy tried to tie it but it just wouldn’t stay tied. On her it almost touched the floor.

“Well, no matter. Now please try this.” Sammy handed her a blank note paper he had picked up from beside the phone as they had walked through the house.

“I want you to do two things and then take off the glasses.”

“OK?”

“I want you to walk around me once, holding this paper between your fingers high away from me as you walk, but stop short from where you started by one step.”

“OK, around once shy of one step, holding the paper out like this.”

“Yes. Now stand still for a minute. Count to 30 or something and then move.” He draped the guitar over her, but held it a few inches from it laying on her back. “On three . . . One . . . two . . . three.”

“Whoa!” said Fran’s voice, not inside of Sammy’s arm where he had released the guitar, but on the outside. One second she was standing at his wrist, the next instant she was standing at his extended elbow on the other side of his arm.

“Whaa . . . ahh” Sammy choked back a scream.

“Whoa! Yikes, the paper just burst into flames!”, stammered Fran.

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Look there are the ashes.” She said pointing at the cold floor. “I couldn’t hold it when it burned.”

They just stood there for a minute looking at each other and the few ashes on the floor that hadn’t been there before. Fran handed the glasses to Sammy.

“Oh my! No way!”

“What?” Sammy was just standing there looking unfocused toward the back wall of the garage.

“Oh, I was just remembering one of my favorite TV shows, 'The Wild, Wild, West'.”

“Right, a cowboy show. Sammy, I think something more weird is happening here. What are you talking about?”

“No, it’s exactly the same thing. See the two main characters were Artimus Gordon and James West. And they rode around in this two car train as special agents . . . “

“And . . . “

“No, wait, Fran, listen. There was this one show, where a bad guy who was a mad scientist or something had invented this potion where he would drink it and the potion would speed him up and he would feel like he was at normal speed, but everybody else would look like they weren’t moving. They would be kind of, but just really, really slow compared to him. In the last scene even, a guy shot a gun or something and West or Gordon got the potion to working and dodged the bullet, which was just hanging in space and knocked the gun away and tied up the bad guy or something. It was cool . . . “

Silence.

“No way.”

“I know it is weird, but that’s what it seems like here. You thought I disappeared, but I didn’t, but you looked paralyzed to me. And it seemed the same way to me when you moved. All I saw was you jump from one side of my arm to the other. I didn't see you move. It’s exactly the same thing. It has to be.”






Sammy brought in the last lamp, the one antique lamp of Fran’s, but which didn’t work. He was going to see if it needed to be rewired or what, but he couldn’t unscrew the light bulb. “I’m afraid I’m going to break it right off if I twist it.”

“Well don’t get the glass all over. Do it in a box or something. There’s a box I just emptied in the kitchen”, Fran called from the back bedroom, her sewing room that was just about all unpacked.

Sammy, carrying the lamp, went out to the kitchen. “I found it!” he said, setting it on the table with the lamp. He pulled open the flaps, and set the lamp inside. He reached under the shade and worked his hand up toward the bulb. He snapped the on off switch once with his fingers as he worked them up to the bulb.

“Fran come here! Quick!”

“What?” Fran said in an annoyed voice as she walked into the kitchen.

“Oh, you fixed it. Cool.”

“Um, yeah, but it’s not plugged in.”

“What!” she murmured in a decidedly less annoyed tone and stepped closer.

“Yeah, and the box isn’t empty either. There’s a picture frame in the bottom. Look.”

“No way, there were only old patterns and fabric in there.” She looked in. “Oh, my. Sure enough there it is. I’ve never seen that before.”

“And it’s stuck to the box, too.”

“Wait. Take the lamp out.”

He did, and it went out. “And the frame is gone too.”

“Here, plug it in.”

“Nothing.”

“NO but the frame is back. Look!”, he held the dark lamp over the box and pointed to the bottom.

“And it’s a picture of a cup?”

“Yeah I know. A cup with a brown tortoise carved on the side.”

“Oh my.”

“Yeah!”

Sammy went to get his glasses, robe and guitar.




Wouldn’t you?



*today’s three things
Desk lamp
Cup
Picture frame