Jason Marc Harris | 35
She’s the braintrust. Not me. I just test well. Her dad’s a damn dentist after all. Mine isn’t really a rocket scientist you know. He’s more of a janitor to be honest—basically just keeps the dust off the telescopes.”
Evan told Mr. Trunder eventually, and like all of us, Mr. Trunder took his turn with that glossy tube. When he pressed it to his eye, he no longer needed a telescope to see distant stars.
Meanwhile Morgan Calloway became most intrigued, not merely because she noted the elasticity and hardness of the Handle, but she was puzzled by the tingling vibration when holding the object as well as fascinated by the mystery of the shiny discharge of glassy beads.
Despite Parker’s earlier rude assumptions about Morgan, she was not a prude. However, she was not about to pleasure herself sexually with an object whose history remained shrouded in mystery and was perhaps quite unhygienic to boot. She closed her hands around the trembling handle, feeling the massaging pulses while she tested the density and texture of its surface with her thin, strong fingers. Touching the Handle proved not to be erotic, but calming and enlightening.
“You’ve got to try this,” she said. Her rapt expression convinced us all.
Never had a small town of disillusioned youth passed a joint among them more rapidly than we took our turns with that tube of ivory metal with the glint of tropical sea shells. Just as Mr. Trunder did, we touched the Handle to our eyes and gazed at distant nebulae flashing and spinning. We touched it to our ears. More than the soft roar of ocean subtly intoned from cupping your ear with a shell, we listened to the rustle and crackle of a quadrillion star systems.
Holding the Handle comforted us all. We dwelt with the truth of the effervescent cosmos.
Pictures, shapes, and sounds splotched, slithered, and hummed into our heads. We learned the rocky wastes of Kepler-186 blow with wind as