Jason Marc Harris | 39
rotunda in clattering heels. How she howled. Mascara ran in shadowy smears when she discovered Mr. Peakes slurring away some Christmas carols and the baby Jesus Samuel froggy-skinned, egg white, and not breathing. Mrs. Bell had trusted the unfortunate Mr. Peakes with her child, and he had betrayed that sacred trust.
Poor Mr. Peakes spent the night in jail for public drunkenness and child neglect while the mayor and the police chief conferred about what to do next.
The rest of us visited the hospital where little Samuel lay newly dead. For a few hours the Handle got ignored.
Well, not by Jimmy Bell. He remembered what had happened when he stuck the metal tube in that ham steak. He knew the power exceeded the ability to make ear-froth and stupors.
Samuel’s body eventually got taken home and sat in a cozy light-blue casket overnight in the living room before the viewing scheduled for the next day.
Jimmy went right ahead around midnight to where Samuel lay stone cold and blue. He stuck the Handle in the soft bulge of Samuel’s calf, smack dab in the pale bluish oxygen-starved flesh.
The big show started from there. Samuel’s leg twitched, and the veins running up and down his whole leg contracted and expanded, flexing like a spider web caught in exhalations of wind.
Jimmy took hope from these marvels, but when nothing changed after a minute, he carried Sam to the barn and his father’s workbench, fired up that reserve power generator that we all want to have around in a bad ice storm when power lines go down or a tornado twists in a ragged funnel of dirt on the horizon. Jimmy grabbed the cable to the back-up generator, thrust it within the aperture of the tubular artifact that had come from beyond the fields we know.