34 | Psychopomp Magazine
repressed to stick it in—even when she’s in private.”
Jimmy defended her honor. “You’re just talking shit cuz she won’t go out with you. Besides, anyone can see this thing is meant to be part of something else. Feel it! I’m telling you, it’s a handle.”
Squeezing the metallic tube, Parker prepared to pound it on Mr. Bell’s anvil, but instead he flung it on the barn floor where it rolled and clanged against a pitchfork. “Damn, it bit me!”
There was no blood, but Parker continued to flop and flex his hand in pain.
“You’re not even bleeding, bro,” Jimmy said. “You’re a real vagina without a period.”
“Fuck you and your weird shit.” Parker punched Jimmy in the shoulder and stomped out of the Bell workshop, his gilt alligator boots printing the earth with semi-circles—rising suns of dirt.
Retrieving the handle, Jimmy noted a few shiny flecks on the oak floorboards. He scooped them into his palm and showed the glassy beads to Evan Trunder, a senior at Marfa High who had recently been accepted into the astronomy program at the University of Texas and whose father helped maintain telescopes up at the McDonald Observatory north of Marfa.
“Check that out. It’s making babies,” Jimmy marveled.
“Could be crystal growth, like mineral packets you can order off the Internet to grow in glass bowls. Or that’s alien shit,” Evan said. “Could mean the thing’s alive. Excretion is a sign of life.”
“That’s far out.” Jimmy stared at the handle with a new reverence.
“Want me to show it to my Dad?”
“No, next thing you know those NASA folks would take it away. We’d all get ‘mind-wiped.’”
“Yeah, just like Men in Black. Maybe we should get it over to Morgan?