Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

All of a sudden what? Susan Parker pursed her lips. Susan always pursed her lips when Gert Fram was stuck for an idea. Finally Gert Fram got the idea and Susan unpursed her lips and wrote some more:

“it started raining. It was raining up instead of down, no, it was evaporating rasins. so the little man jumped on a rasin + flew up on it. when he got up in space he saw the rasin moon and it looked like one big Prune. He was overjoyed. In fact he was so overjoyed that he forgot his name and that is why his name isn’t said in this book.”

Susan Parker laughed. Gert Fram really had a funny way with words.

“He had a bunch of rasins for his supper + he was thirsty and he didn’t know what to do. All of a sudden he got an idea. He jumped on a molecule + floated down to the supermarket. He went in and got all the juice, and threw it all in the sky + it started floating up and it made a juice moon. For days he lived up there + after a while he got sick of it so he went down to earth again, + threw all the food and it all floated up in the sky. There was a banana moon + a cornflake moon etc. There even was a pencil moon because he accidently threw some pencils, soon it was a food sky + soon all the gravity got soaked up so there was none left. So the little man observed + every thing floated down to earth again.”

Uh-oh. Last page. Two-inch by four-inch pages filled up fast. Gert Fram decided to wrap things up fast.

“All except rasin moon because he was there in the first place + it wouldn’t be fair. After a while the rasins stopped evaporating but the rasin moon stayed. in the sky. It was happy + so was the little man.”

On the back of the book Gert Fram drew a picture of a wrinkled up lumpy moon with little wrinkled lumps rising up to it and a man at the bottom. She labeled it, “The little man riding up to the rasin moon.”

Actually, both Susan and Gert Fram knew how to spell raisin. But leaving out the first i gave the word a little more class.

Susan reread the novel. Gert Fram was OK.

“It’s dinner time, Susan and Annabelle and Vanessa and Jonathan!” her mother called from downstairs. Susan leaned back in her chair and wondered whether her agent would like Rasin Moon. Probably not. Her agent wasn’t really very happy because nobody had ever bought any of Gert Fram’s novels yet and a ten percent commission of nothing doesn’t add up to much.

“Susan, everybody’s here except you!”

Susan proudly added Rasin Moon to her library.

Downstairs Father was mumbling something to Mother. Then Father called out, “Gert Fram! It’s suppertime!”

Susan got up carefully from her chair and walked with dignity to the door of her study/library/den/bedroom. Then she ran down the stairs and scurried into the dining room and dove into her chair and said, “Gert Fram just finished a novel and it’s the greatest yet.”

No one paid much attention to what she said, however, because in diving for her chair she had jostled the table and two glasses of lemonade had spilled.

“Can’t you be careful for even a minute!” her mother said, crossly wiping up the mess.

“Gert Fram writes a novel and Susan has to drown us to celebrate,” Jonathan said in his funny voice that he reserved for making jokes about Susan.

Susan got up from the table and ran back upstairs. She heard them talking downstairs. “You didn’t need to talk like that, Jonathan.”

“Dad, she’s so dumb, she’s always knocking things around—”

“She’s not dumb, and now she’s upset and gone upstairs—”

“Careful, Annabelle, the lemonade’s about to drip off the table on you.”

Susan shut the bedroom door. She walked to the desk and added a name to the list: “Creepy Jonathan,” she wrote, because he hated to be called that. Then she heard her father calling. “Gert Fram or Susan Parker, whichever of you is hungrier, come downstairs and eat dinner.”

Susan didn’t want to go back down. Everybody would watch her walk in and sit down. Jonathan would be thinking she was dumb. So would everybody else. On the other hand she was hungry.

Well, if Susan didn’t have any nerve, Gert Fram did. Gert Fram walked with dignity out the door of the bedroom and down the stairs. She paused at the bottom of the steps (all great and famous writers pause at the bottoms of stairways), and then turned and walked with dignity to the table.

She heard Jonathan laugh and only looked down her nose at him. Susan would have been humiliated. But Gert Fram could put such riff-raff in their place.

But during dinner she forgot to be Gert Fram and almost cried once when she knocked over the salt and Annabelle sighed and set it back up. Annabelle could afford to sigh. She was sixteen and smart and wore makeup and never spilled anything.

After dinner everything went okay for about two minutes. Then she heard her father say, “All right, who did it?”

He sounded angry.

“Who did what, dear?” Mother asked in her don’t-be-angry-dear voice.

Susan looked up at her mother and said, “If it’s something bad, I did it.”

Father came into the dining room holding the Herald.

“I did it, all right,” Susan said.

“Somebody cut something out of the other side of the newspaper and now all I’ve got is half a crossword puzzle,” Father said. Father always did the crossword puzzle.

“Well, dear,” said Mother in her please-don’t-get-upset-at-anyone voice, “you never do more than half of it anyway.”

Father didn’t think it was funny. “I thought I told everybody in the family not to cut anything out of a newspaper until it was a day old!”

Susan jumped up from the table, where she had been sitting pulling petals off the flowers in the vase. “Well I thought it was the old newspaper and it was a picture of a bride who’s getting married in the temple and I cut it out because I wanted a picture of her and I’m sorry I didn’t know it was today’s paper.”

Father and Mother looked at Susan. They really weren’t sure what to say to this outburst.

“I’ll go get the picture and I’ll glue it back in!” Susan shouted. “I’ll glue it back in with my own blood if you want, I’m sorry I cut out the crossword puzzle!”

Then Father noticed the little pile of petals on the table.

“Susan, you have pulled every single petal off the flowers.”

Susan looked at the petals. She looked at her father. She decided not to cry in front of them. She ran out of the room.

As she left, she heard Mother saying to Father, “I really don’t think that was the best time to say that, dear.”

When Susan got to the front door, which she had to pass in order to go up the stairs, Vanessa was standing there with her boyfriend Raymond. They looked very surprised to see her. They looked like it was not a pleasant surprise. Because Susan didn’t know what else to do, she stopped and looked at them and said, “Hi.” Raymond let go of Vanessa’s hand.

Raymond made a face and looked away and Vanessa said, “Honestly, there isn’t a place in the entire house where a person can find any privacy.”

Susan tried to defend herself. “There isn’t another stairway. When I’m going to my room I have to pass through here.”

Vanessa looked up at the ceiling in disgust. “When you are coming, you could at least have the courtesy to announce your presence.”

“All right, all right,” Susan said. She walked up the stairs, shouting at the top of her voice, “I’m coming, I’m coming! Unclean, unclean! Beware, beware! Susan’s presence is coming!”

From downstairs somewhere three voices shouted at once, “Susan will you stop that shouting! For heaven’s sake!” Jonathan’s voice added, “What a jerk.” Mother’s voice said, “Jonathan, that doesn’t help a thing.”