Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

Itty “The Human” Snibb had planned to do many things that morning, had planned, for instance, to read the business section of that World News he’d just left spread behind him on his comfy leatherette seat like a shot gray-and-white bird, mutely rehearse his acceptance speech while sipping champagne, catnap both to retrieve some sleep lost the night before and ease the jetlag awaiting his arrival just beyond baggage claim at the Spokane airport, wake to a cup of sweet coffee and cream before beginning the smooth descent toward the hour-and-a-half limo drive west that would end in an amazingly level black parking lot belonging to that low-slung motel, itself the product of a franchise, somewhere on a dead scrubby patch of sizzling summer highway between Almira and Hartline; but now, spasmodically erupting as that blond-bunned flight attendant rapped diffidently at the door and inquired if there were anything she might do to ease his misery, too overrun with his body’s riot to reply, able only to bring forth a few juicy gasps like some suffocating cold-victim in the throes of a world-class sinus attack while rocking side to side and back to front on the (even to him) constrictive toilet seat stuck in the constrictive phone booth that passed for a lavatory on the DC-10, cramps ramrodding his intestines like a team of narcotics agents at the portal of a crack house at two in the morning, temples pressurizing for detonation with cartilage-ripping exertions that resounded through his torso like savage miniature plate tectonics on a particularly busy day in the Pacific rim, Itty was reminded of something his mother, Millie, also a delicately hunchbacked dwarf, and also in something approaching a continual state of metaphysical PMS (due in large part to the fact that her husband, Hal, a circus clown with a propensity for the bizarre, left her after six years of fairly blissful marriage and astoundingly creative sex for a tall svelte trapeze artist twice Millie’s height and only two-thirds her weight), told him from the time he was three in that crummy trailer park on the outskirts of Beaverville, Illinois, where he suddenly came to consciousness one leafy autumn afternoon in 1963, that if you want to see god laugh all you have to do is tell him what your plans are.

Simultaneously, however, somewhere deep in the intricate infrastructure of his brainstem, Itty realized with warm comfort that the worst had already passed, the most awful was already slowly gathering not before but behind him, things could only and would only improve from this blink of an eye forward, leaving him nothing save the selfless act of surrendering wholly to the wretched blood-dimmed swamp gurgling and belching beneath him, dabbing the sweat from his damp brow, and exploring with Zen-like detachment the multifarious combinations of searing woe that can be heaped upon a mortal — all of which ultimately would have been true, given another three-quarters of an hour or so, sixty minutes tops, had not a certain computer operator named Wally Klott at the NASA tracking center in Houston three years earlier fallen seriously in love with a certain co-worker named Matilda Weingarten, flinching as he began to stand one day because Mattie happened just then to stroll past his cubicle, glorious hips swaying (if you use your imagination, which Wally did) beneath her baggy navy-blue slacks, strawberry helmet of hair catching the light in a fluorescent shimmer, and to actually say “Hiya, Wally, what’s up?” which sent poor Wally Klott right over the amorous edge, causing him to knock his nearly full cup of heavily NutraSweetened coffee atop his console onto its side with a brown splash, splutter, and hiss that flatlined his system instantaneously and sent an electronic coronary galloping into earth’s orbit at the speed of radio waves directly into the soul of MURMA-5, a small weather satellite in geosynchronous spin above, more or less, Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, that Wally had been monitoring, thereby affecting its trajectory by less than a gnat’s left eyebrow’s follicle, which didn’t seem like all that terribly much at the time, especially since Wally flicked off his unit immediately, but which can really add up over a couple of million seconds when no one notices the mistake initially and then the strangeness of the satellite’s rotation can’t easily be corrected when one does notice it (the one being, in this case, Mattie herself, thirteen months after the fact, and two weeks and two days after she and Wally finally consummated their budding relationship in a chlorine-scented stall of the women’s restroom at the NASA tracking center in Houston amid much klutzing around with snaps and zippers, and many apologies for brevity, environmentally induced asthma, and faulty aim), which strangeness over the course of those three years tilted MURMA-5 right into the maiden traces of earth’s frictive atmosphere and hence into a wild wobble which gravity, being gravity, just ate up, tore apart, sucked right down into the stratosphere, where the MURMA-5 plain disintegrated, or virtually plain disintegrated, broadcasting redhot fragments of itself hither and yon, one of which (no bigger than Itty’s fist, still clenched in somber concentration as a scalding café-noir rivulet squirted from him) rocketed toward a recently cut bale of hay hulking like a gigantic beige Tootsie Roll in a farm field one mile west of Lebanon, South Dakota, on a course that would have completely obliterated that bale in a megalithic fulmination of unsuspecting mice, an intensely malicious tabby poised for the pounce, and a conflagration that would’ve ignited this field and the next two over, threatening the nearby town with extinction for the better part of an afternoon, till firefighters from three counties finally showed up with some important-looking firefighting equipment — except that on its way down it struck the first-class section of the DC-10 instead, ripping a yard-wide hole in its fuselage and creating the hugest intake-of-breath sound most of the passengers have probably ever heard.

This at the precise instant Itty, having briefly regained his equilibrium, parted his lips to answer the flight attendant who was querying him about the state of his affliction from the other side of the lavatory door. In place of the no he’d been preparing to utter in response to her fairly moronic question, followed by a peremptory so fuck off , all he could manage was the uh part of uh-oh before the door burst open and Itty promptly became a semi-human projectile. Still in a sitting position, pants bunched around his ankles like a pile of dead bats, effluents materializing behind him like some kind of indelible-ink trail he would later be able to follow home, Itty soared down the aisle toward the scrap of china-blue sky seemingly painted in the fuselage. While it would definitely be an overstatement to assert that Itty understood exactly what was happening, it is nonetheless clear that at some intuitive level of awareness, like that of a kid watching a horse stuck on a barbed-wire fence smear past the backseat window of his parents’ car on an interstate at dusk, he gleaned various haunting sense impressions as he barreled through the tornado of magazines, styrofoam-cup shreds, glints of wire-rimmed glasses ripped from the faces of astonished lawyers as they reached to adjust them, shrunken pillows, baby blankets, wet gleams of recently extracted dentures, egg bits, dented cans of Diet 7-Up, bacon flecks, plastic trays, gold pens, cries of shock, oxygen masks shivering in the titanic aspiration, loose rhinestone earrings, clouds of airborne liquids, a forest of those untouched leaves of lettuce, someone’s calculator, rumpled cowboy hats, one of those seat cushions said to double as a life vest (which Itty tried to grab, and failed), snowballs of paper and crumpled napkins, Christmas ornaments of tinfoil, a lone leather-thonged sandal, a dingy prosthetic arm, a flicker of Stephen King novels, pink sweaters undulating like flamingos on extended wings, a green vortex of ten- and twenty-dollar bills, belts that suddenly became snakes, umbrellas that suddenly became spears, shopping bags that suddenly became headgear, rapidly scattering decks of cards, miniature liquor bottles, laptop computers, a carmine-faced Englishman flapping from an overhead bin, and, most immediate for Itty, the tight ass (now covered only by a pair of boring white Fruit-of-the-Loom panties so thinned from use that Itty could even at this velocity and remoteness make out the rose tattoo adorning her taut tanned left cheek floating with unavoidable facticity at eye-level) of the flight attendant who wore her skirt inside-out and over her upper torso as if she’d dressed herself today with the intent of walking on her hands, and who was now whizzing nine feet in front of him as Itty tried unsuccessfully to unfreeze the leer frozen on his face till, in a sort of impetuous leap of faith, he was surrounded by pearly white and icy blue and it struck him that he was no longer inside the DC-10, which had begun what was euphemistically referred to by Dan Rather later that day on the CBS Evening News as a twenty-thousand foot “controlled dive,” but outside it, hovering in frigid nothingness, the rumble of the jet’s engines rapidly receding.