Down World by Rebecca Phelps (best new books to read .txt) 📕

“Sorry,” Brady said immediately and closed the door behind us. It sealed with a resounding thud, which made me swallow back a tinge of fear. “We’re sorry to disturb you.”

“Well, I already told her I can’t help you,” John said, muttering so quietly I almost couldn’t make him out. He didn’t stop painting the whole time, and didn’t look up at us once.

Brady seemed to be weighing the situation, figuring out how to approach this man. “Nice work there,” he finally said. “May I?”

John muttered some sort of approval under his breath. And so Brady walked across the great expanse of floor and approached the table, picking up a figurine. “Great detail,” he finally said.

“I sell them,” John responded. “There’s a shop in town. The kids here love them.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I quietly walked a bit closer so I could hear them, taking in the artwork on the walls as I passed—a hodgepodge of cultures and images, ranging from a bust of a Greek woman to a picture of a Japanese geisha putting on makeup to a tableau of African women doing laundry in a river.

“That’s awesome,” Brady added. “You know, my dad owns a shop like that where we’re from. He would love this stuff. Maybe I could buy a few pieces for him?”

I listened, a bit dumbfounded. Brady had said it so naturally that anyone listening would never doubt it was true. For a moment I wondered if it was. Maybe his dad did own a shop somewhere, and the fishing-boat story had been the lie.

“Suit yourself,” John said, still not looking up.

“Sir, the reason we’re here . . . ,” Brady began.

“I can’t help you get your girlfriend back,” John interrupted him, having obviously already talked to Sage about this.

“It’s very important, though, sir,” Brady kept going. “If you could help me talk to her. If you could tell us how to find her . . . ,” and here he paused for a second and glanced at me, “or find Marina’s mom . . .”

“If I knew how to find someone down there, do you think I’d be here painting hobbits for the rest of my life?”

“You must know more than you’re saying,” Brady insisted. “I mean, you invented it.”

“I didn’t invent it!” John suddenly exploded, standing up from his chair. “I didn’t do that. They did that. It’s not my fault!”

“Okay, okay,” Brady said, backing down.

“You think I wanted to lose everyone and everything to that pit? You think I chose this? I warned them.”

“I believe you,” Brady said, but it was too late to stop the torrent of words from John.

“I warned them and nobody would listen to me.”

“John, stop,” came a voice from behind me. We turned around and saw Sage standing in the open doorway. She was still holding the attachment to a vacuum cleaner. “Don’t do this. They’re just kids.”

“Why is this always my fault?” John asked.

“It’s not your fault, honey,” she said, clearly having been down this road with him before. “Sit down.”

John did as he was told and sat back down at his worktable. But he took the magnifying lens off his head. He rubbed his hair absentmindedly while he continued to mutter to himself.

“Sage,” I began. “Can you please tell us what he’s talking about?”

Sage came into the room a bit and put down the vacuum attachment. “Well . . . ,” she began, stretching out her back and sighing. “How well do you understand nuclear fission?”

Brady and I looked at each other with the same blank faces.

This was going to be a long afternoon.

We sat on the floor on some of those beautifully knit throw pillows around the coffee table. The afternoon sun was still high in the sky and the loft had turned quite warm. John opened a couple of windows and turned on some ceiling fans, creating a nice breeze that stirred the curtains and made the whole place feel like it should be in a design catalog.

“So when you explode an atom,” Sage began, “and stop me if you already know this, I don’t want to bore you . . .”

Brady and I both shook our heads.

“ . . . you release an extraordinary amount of energy.” Sage looked to John, who was at his worktable, actively ignoring us. She poured us each a cup of tea from a large pot with a bamboo handle. “Do either of you take sugar?” She offered us a little spoonful of some large yellowish grains, about the size of ants.

“Yes, please.” Our response, in unison.

“Imagine,” she continued, “dropping a grain of sugar into, say, a pot of tea.” She took the lid off the teapot and, while the steam billowed past her, she took one of those large sugar grains into her hand and dropped it into the tea. It landed with a plunk.

“Did you see it?”

“It fell in,” I replied.

“Not the sugar,” she continued. “That’s just the dead weight. I mean the energy. Look closer.”

Brady and I leaned in a bit closer, until the steam from the tea was tickling the tiny hairs at the top of my forehead. I didn’t see what she was talking about, but leaning over the dark liquid like that made me think of something. It reminded me of the darkroom at the school, of that time I was hiding out up there, and I knew someone was coming up the stairs because of the vibrations in the little pool of developing solution.

“Do you mean the vibrations?” I asked.

“Smart girl,” she answered. “When you disturb a flat pool, you set off a series of waves, emanating out from the drop point. They’re in the teapot now, even if you can’t see them. And where do they end?”

Brady sat back a bit. “They end when they hit the pot.”

“If they’re in a pot, they do,” she agreed. “Now imagine there is no pot. The pool is infinite. Where do they end?”

I looked to Brady, who was shaking