Archibald Wix was a retired banker, meek
and mild, who lived his days in ease … if ease can be defined as listening to
the incessant nagging of his obsessive-compulsive wife, Clara. Archibald
usually turned his hearing aid down in the evening while reading the paper. It
was a sacrosanct hour, when silence and the crisp pages of the Herald,
spread wide, blocked out whining that had begun thirty-seven years earlier.
“Your shirts are hanging crookedly on the hangers again!” Clara shouted from
the kitchen.
Archibald turned to the Science and Technology page and read that mini-black
holes, no bigger than the wart on a stepmother’s jaw, drifted through space
like vagabonds looking for handouts. Well, in theory, at least.
“Archibald, you left your cup in the sink again!” Clara said with vocal cords
raw from years of finding fault with the cosmos.
An hour passed, and Archibald turned his hearing aid up to see if any natural
disaster other than Clara required his attention. He lived near the San Andreas
Fault, and sometimes the earth did a quick mambo, rattling the china cabinet.
He heard a melodious voice singing in the kitchen, a voice with the clarity of
crystal and the timbre of a medieval damsel singing ballads to her suitor. It
was a situation that called for investigation.
“Hello, Archie,” said a comely woman in her early forties. “What would you like
for dinner?”
To Archibald’s left, a small black dot was floating through the kitchen, boring
into the wall as a small, tinny voice called from the dot’s infinite density: “What
are you up to, Archibald? Who is that woman in our kitchen? Get me out of
here!”
Archibald wasn’t a scientist, but he knew that black holes not only gobbled up
matter but also coughed up molecules on occasion, like cosmological burps. A
mini black hole had apparently wandered through his kitchen, making both a
deposit and a withdrawal. So long Clara, hello Elizabeth, the name of
Archibald’s good fortune.
“How did you get here?” the banker inquired.
“I’m not quite sure,” Elizabeth said. “I remember being somewhere very small,
like a genie’s bottle or a magic lamp. But I know you’re Archie, and now I’m
here in the kitchen. So what would you like for dinner?”
“You,” replied Archibald Wix, not feeling the need to provide any astronomical
explanations to a woman just moments away from the delights of courtly love.
As a banker, Archibald had always kept his books balanced. The universe had
given him far more than a gold watch in return.
by William Hammett
Copyright William Hammett 2013, 2022
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