The Spot: Stories

On the evening of his death the water was serene and flat and unusually glossy as dusk hung over the lake. The failing daylight lent it an unusual copper color, so that from his vantage, on the porch, he watched while all that remained of the day poured itself out into the water and then was sucked into an obsidian form surrounded by the silhouettes of trees and, above those, a blue-black sky with stars peeking through — all this on an evening when the first hints of fall entered the air. (No one can say exactly why, but it seems important that it was a mild evening, not too hot, not too cold, and that the fire that consumed him could not be attributed, say, to one of the long hot spells that plagued the state with blazes that summer.) His cottage had degenerated from pristine, freshly painted each year, to shabby and run-down, with scales of lead flakes coming off the clapboards and a rank odor emerging from beneath the porch. The pavestones on the steps down to the beach had crumbled like blue cheese, and the dock, left out to freeze in the ice over the years, lurched vulgarly to one side.

Variants

Perhaps it helps to imagine those recently discovered variants of lightning that appear between sky and space along the upper reaches of thunderheads: red sprites, mushrooming elves, electric (smoke) rings clutching at the sinkhole of space.

Perhaps it helps to imagine the small sparks of current between the cell walls, bunching up into the endoplasmic reticulum, congealing in the ribosome; those tight nuggets of life until, swarming like killer bees, certain charges cohere, gather heat, and then — well, then there is nothing but raw resistance and flame. Perhaps it is simply useful to remind oneself that there are still unseen mysteries at hand.

Square Dancing

Even when he was president of Mear Paper, riding shotgun in his modified Checker with its chrome sideboards, wet bar, and flashy leather backseats, he’d order his chauffeur to stop at the VFW hall so he could watch the Friday square dance called by Burt Michigan Wolverine, whose barking voice created intricate patterns as partners linked arms and rotated in that effortless yet demanding tension when there is just enough lust (and love) between pairs to make their temporary partings seem lonely and tragic until their reunifications at the end.

Potentially Related Strange Phenomena

Barns catching fire — on hot summer afternoons — out of the blue and for no apparent reason; a person disappearing in the dead of night, leaving only a pile of blankets on the bed and an ash-stenciled outline of his or her last sleeping formation; war hoots along the border of Kansas; the lonely, dim-throated voice of Riding Thunder, or Kit Carson, seeping into the radio static.

Additional Theories: The Spiral Notebook

Word was McGee had a fascination with the idea of the spiral notebook, and even claimed that he had invented the product himself. He expressed admiration for the curl of wire embracing the punched holes, drawing the pages into a tight alliance. One old-timer remembers seeing him in the break room during his electrician days, fiddling with wire, twisting it around a dowel. Only through stubborn will is it possible to fit his obsession with the spiral notebook into the manner in which he died that evening at the lake, and in doing so one has to turn to a grand theory that includes the ideas of symmetry and of the spiral in relation to the stress — and heat and friction — certain bond papers produce when a sheet is torn away. But that is a stretch.

Additional Theories: Dynamite