the small amateur’s telescope along in its cheap plastic case.
“So this is it, huh?” Tad’s hands gripped his hips and his mouth was bent in a sneer of dissatisfaction.
Douglas shook his head. “No, this isn’t it. This is just the entrance to The Crawlspace. We won’t reach Earth’s End for another couple of hours.”
“Two hours!” Tad cried.
“Maybe less. It depends on how fast you can walk.”
“Why don’t we just drive up there?”
“Because we’d need a road to do that,” Douglas explained. He grinned and added, “The mouth of The Crawlspace here is as close to Earth’s End as you can get by vehicle.”
Douglas stepped over a corroded iron chain that drooped across a thin footpath. A battered signed warned NO TRESPASSING. NATURAL REGENERATION IN PROGRESS. DEPT. OF AGROFORESTRY, but the faintness of the text rendered the warning inconsequential.
3
Two years ago Petra had been single and had sacrificed her days for slave’s wages at an independent book and magazine shop in Providence. Tad had been one of her regular customers. The store sat kitty-corner to the financial planning firm where he was employed, and three or four times a week Tad would escape his desk in order to pay a lunch-hour visit to Petra’s store, usually for a newspaper, but occasionally for a paperback potboiler. His shyness was mild enough to be endearing.
Four months of lingering and small talk lapsed before they had their first date. It was Petra who’d done the asking. They went to a screening of Picnic at Hanging Rock at The Columbus Theater and then for coffee at a quaint diner that had art deco fixtures and a live jazz trio every Thursday. By Christmas that year they were living together.
But their pantomime of married life began to erode all too quickly, and Petra did not even have wedding day memories to cling to as the watershed of their happiness.
A promotion resulted in an almost exponential increase in Tad’s hours at the office. With her meagre financial contributions rendered unnecessary, Petra quit her job. Tad bought a house for her to rattle around in and stew over her fear that, day by day, she was becoming her mother; someone whose life had always seemed to Petra to be little more than a forty-year-long stifled scream.
Her only salvation came in the form of lazy daydreaming on the living room sofa. She would fantasize about fashioning one of the upper bedrooms with a crib, a brightly coloured rocking chair, a herd of cartoon zoo animals dangling from a ceiling mobile.
After sharing her fantasies with Tad during afterglow one night, he’d told her they would talk about kids when the timing was better. Timing had always been of great importance to Tad, always.
That night she’d come to realize that a pure and unconditional love, something she’d been aching for since childhood, was something that could never be found in the world. Adults had too many conflicting needs to truly mesh with one another completely. There was too much solipsism, too much baggage on everyone’s back. The only way to find that pure love was to create it. To create a living being that was partly her; Petra wanted nothing more than this.
But Tad had other plans.
As she drifted off that night, Petra experienced the first in what would become a running stream of recurring nightmares. These unsettling dreams differed widely in aspect but were unwavering in theme: she would always be held captive by her past. Some nights she would find herself at a party, cornered by several of her ex-boyfriends, all of whom took great pleasure passing a telephone between them and sharing with Tad all the mistakes and embarrassing things she’d done during the time they were each bedding her. Other nights she would dream of wandering her childhood home, which would be rotted and haunted by the anguished ghost of her mother.
The nightmare where her father, afflicted with something akin to rabies, chased her down an endless stairway,
“So this is it, huh?” Tad’s hands gripped his hips and his mouth was bent in a sneer of dissatisfaction.
Douglas shook his head. “No, this isn’t it. This is just the entrance to The Crawlspace. We won’t reach Earth’s End for another couple of hours.”
“Two hours!” Tad cried.
“Maybe less. It depends on how fast you can walk.”
“Why don’t we just drive up there?”
“Because we’d need a road to do that,” Douglas explained. He grinned and added, “The mouth of The Crawlspace here is as close to Earth’s End as you can get by vehicle.”
Douglas stepped over a corroded iron chain that drooped across a thin footpath. A battered signed warned NO TRESPASSING. NATURAL REGENERATION IN PROGRESS. DEPT. OF AGROFORESTRY, but the faintness of the text rendered the warning inconsequential.
3
Two years ago Petra had been single and had sacrificed her days for slave’s wages at an independent book and magazine shop in Providence. Tad had been one of her regular customers. The store sat kitty-corner to the financial planning firm where he was employed, and three or four times a week Tad would escape his desk in order to pay a lunch-hour visit to Petra’s store, usually for a newspaper, but occasionally for a paperback potboiler. His shyness was mild enough to be endearing.
Four months of lingering and small talk lapsed before they had their first date. It was Petra who’d done the asking. They went to a screening of Picnic at Hanging Rock at The Columbus Theater and then for coffee at a quaint diner that had art deco fixtures and a live jazz trio every Thursday. By Christmas that year they were living together.
But their pantomime of married life began to erode all too quickly, and Petra did not even have wedding day memories to cling to as the watershed of their happiness.
A promotion resulted in an almost exponential increase in Tad’s hours at the office. With her meagre financial contributions rendered unnecessary, Petra quit her job. Tad bought a house for her to rattle around in and stew over her fear that, day by day, she was becoming her mother; someone whose life had always seemed to Petra to be little more than a forty-year-long stifled scream.
Her only salvation came in the form of lazy daydreaming on the living room sofa. She would fantasize about fashioning one of the upper bedrooms with a crib, a brightly coloured rocking chair, a herd of cartoon zoo animals dangling from a ceiling mobile.
After sharing her fantasies with Tad during afterglow one night, he’d told her they would talk about kids when the timing was better. Timing had always been of great importance to Tad, always.
That night she’d come to realize that a pure and unconditional love, something she’d been aching for since childhood, was something that could never be found in the world. Adults had too many conflicting needs to truly mesh with one another completely. There was too much solipsism, too much baggage on everyone’s back. The only way to find that pure love was to create it. To create a living being that was partly her; Petra wanted nothing more than this.
But Tad had other plans.
As she drifted off that night, Petra experienced the first in what would become a running stream of recurring nightmares. These unsettling dreams differed widely in aspect but were unwavering in theme: she would always be held captive by her past. Some nights she would find herself at a party, cornered by several of her ex-boyfriends, all of whom took great pleasure passing a telephone between them and sharing with Tad all the mistakes and embarrassing things she’d done during the time they were each bedding her. Other nights she would dream of wandering her childhood home, which would be rotted and haunted by the anguished ghost of her mother.
The nightmare where her father, afflicted with something akin to rabies, chased her down an endless stairway,
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