The Smell of Ozone

Chapter 5: Guardian

Our final Methodist retreat is uneventful. Except for the handful of newcomers, we know all of the campers. Celeste and I follow our regular routine during the days and nights, especially the nights. While we never cross that final, intimate threshold, we consider it.

When we say our goodbyes on the final day, we know that this chapter of our life together is over. However, we'll soon begin another, as young adults, but the next will be much harder to write. Our relationship is strong enough to survive—we hope.

The next 18 months are not easy. I score a great job in the Astrodome as a runner in the skyboxes. In a few short months, I work my way up to Liquor Department Manager, all the while attending the local junior college creatively named Houston Community College. Someone put a lot of thought into that. Sarcasm is the glue that hold my sanity together.

Celeste and I keep in touch through snail mail and telephone calls, most of them fairly chaste. Those that aren't? Damn. My fiancé is quite a bit more worldly than I initially thought. Of course, I respond in kind.

While I don't have any direct experience, I am exposed to quite a bit of it peripherally. You get to see a lot while working the skyboxes, especially as the Liquor Department manager. At the end of the night, I get to witness some very spectacular and other, thoroughly disgusting things.

Since my job depends on occasional events, I have a decent amount of downtime. When I'm broke, I work on my levitation experiment at home in da Hood instead of my apartment. I've made significant progress. Though my mechanism is made from cobbled together parts from a nearby junkyard, I can now levitate metallic and non metallic objects six inches off the ground and move them from one side of the garage to the other... at a snail's pace.

*****

On one momentous occasion that scared the literal crap out of me, I blew a nearby transformer. To keep my electric bill down, I hook directly to city power, illegally,of course. The circuit boards I use to control my experiment's magnetic field are exposed to open air to help dissipate the aggegious am out of heat they emit.

From what was left of the carcass, an dragonfly landed on one of my boards during a levitation session and shorted a couple of contacts. Several things happened in short succession. The surge of power through my transformers increased beyond their limits, creating a deafening, high-frequency keening that threatened to rupture my ear drums.

The 200lb test crate was only halfway across the room when a bright light almost burned my retinas away, followed by the boom of the city's transformer and lit my circuit board on fire. When everything finally calmed down and I put the fire out, the smell of ozone filled my nostrils.

When I looked for the test crate, it was nowhere to be found. I searched for holes in the walls, thinking that maybe the surge accelerated it through the side of the building, but found nothing. And then I explored outside. My 200lb test crate was nearly 100 feet away, sitting in the central court of the 'abandoned' apartment complex across the street.

After retrieving it with my two-wheel dolly, I sat in the darkened garage until my brain stopped reeling with the possibilities. Sure, the crate could have flown through the open garage door but it didn't face the apartments. Could the frequency have shifted enough to guide it through a near-perfect 90-degree angle? Yeah. Possible. Likely? Hell no, but possible.

As my mind ran through a thousand different scenarios, I settle on the only one that made any sense. The crate teleported. Impossible as it was, that was the only thing that made sense.

I threw everything away at that point. All except my blueprints and the burned circuit board. It was far too dangerous to continue my experiments in such a primitive environment.