Warp(s) by Beth Rubinstein Bosworth

Zander just had time to mistake Wilma’s wristwatch for his own when he fell through a time warp into outer space. A meteor, wheeling past, blew him to smithereens.

Smithereens, Kansas, was a very small town, so small that it fit on the palm of Jody’s hand. She wasn’t a mean girl, but she squeezed ever so slightly.

“Did you feel that?” Angus called out to his wife, Muriel, who’d agreed to convert years ago (she’d been raised vaguely Jewish) but kept getting these migraines.

“No,” she called, looking up from her rather worn copy of Our Wesleyan Reader, “did you?”

On the 999th anniversary of the Protoplasmos, the Pupils parade through the schoolyard and down Main Street. They prance around the Australian Mulberry and bare their pinkish mandibles and wave their antennae to a popular song, lyrics long forgotten.  

Many people question why an all-powerful God would allow us to suffer, Muriel read and pressed a finger to her throbbing temple. Something was dripping down the window pane.

A dog, waddling out from under a verandah, takes one look at the Pupils’ pink mandibles and tries to hurry away. “Here, Lucy!  Lucy!” the old man calls: he has hoped to live long enough to see the bitch whelp.  

In the last instant of consciousness, Zander felt the shreds of himself wheeling through that howlingly cold (yet silent) vacuum. I must be in love, he almost had time to marvel.

Whitish blobs had fallen on the house next door, its roof, its cupola—its portcullis— whitish blobs were dribbling from treetops and mailboxes.  The odor, protoplasmic, fetid, persuaded Muriel to slam the window and slink down, her back pressed against the wall, her mind an ever-expanding chamber from whose depths a shaggy, four-legged creature emerged, snarling: Baal?  

“I’m sick of teaching,” Wilma told her acupuncturist with a sigh.

But the young woman, after sticking several needles in Wilma’s big toes, had in fact slipped out of the room: her brother was suicidal and she preferred to take his calls.  

 A tear crept from under one of Wilma’s eyelids.

She waited what seemed a long time (Was that a car’s tires squealing out of the parking lot?) before calling for help.

Beth Rubinstein Bosworth is the author of three books of fiction, including The Source of Life and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, Drue Heinz Literature Prize 2012). Her stories have appeared in KR ONLINE, AGNI, Diagram, Guernica, and elsewhere. Currently she divides her time between Brooklyn, New York and Arlington, Vermont.