Read Online Are You There and Other Stories by Jack Skillingstead - Free Book Online Page B

loop it’s not Sunday,” she said. “It’s the same day over again.”
    “Two Saturdays. Not a bad deal.”
    “Not just two. It goes on and on. November ninth a thousand, ten thousand, a million times over.”
    “Okay.”
    “You can look at me like that if you want. I don’t care if you believe me. You know something, Toby?”
    “What?”
    “I’m having a really good day.”
    “That’s November ninth for you.”
    She smiled at him, then kissed him, that feeling, the taste, all of the sensation in its totality.
    “I want to see my grandparents now.”
    She opened the door and got out but he stayed in the car. She crossed the lawn strewn with big colorful oak leaves to the front door of the house, stealing backward glances, wanting to know he was still there waiting for her in the yellow car. Her lover. Her boyfriend.
    She started to knock on the door but hesitated. From inside the big house she heard muffled music and laughter. She looked around. In the breeze an orange oak leaf detached from the tree and spun down. The sky blew clear and cold. Later it would cloud over and rain. Kylie knew all about this day. She had been told of it since she was a small child. The last day of the world, perfectly preserved for the edification of alien Tourists and anthropologists. Some people said what happened was an accident, a consequence of the aliens opening the rift, disrupting the fabric of reality. What really pissed everybody off, Kylie thought, was the dismissive attitude. There was no occupying army, no invasion. They came, destroyed everything either intentionally or accidentally, then ignored the survivors. The Preservation was the only thing about the former masters of the Earth that interested them.
    Kylie didn’t care about all that right now. She had been told about the day, but she had never understood what the day meant, the sheer sensorial joy of it, the incredible beauty and rightness of it. A surge of pure delight moved through her being, and for a moment she experienced uncontainable happiness.
    She knocked on the door.
    “Yes?” A woman in her mid-fifties with vivid green eyes, her face pressed with comfortable laugh lines. Like the house, she was a picture come to life. (Kylie’s grandmother showing her the photographs, faded and worn from too much touching).
    “Hi,” Kylie said.
    “Can I help you?” the live photograph said.
    “No. I mean, I wanted to ask you something.”
    The waiting expression on her face so familiar. Kylie said, “I just wanted to know, are you having a good day, I mean a really good day?”
    Slight turn of the head, lips pursed uncertainly, ready to believe this was a harmless question from a harmless person.
    “It’s like a survey,” Kylie said. “For school?”
    A man of about sixty years wearing a baggy wool sweater and glasses came to the door.
    “What’s all this?” he asked.
    “A happiness survey,” Kylie’s great grandmother said, and laughed.
    “Happiness survey, huh?” He casually put his arm around his wife and pulled her companionably against him.
    “Yes,” Kylie said. “For school.”
    “Well, I’m happy as a clam,” Kylie’s great grandfather said.
    “I’m a clam, too,” Kylie’s great grandmother said. “A happy one.”
    “Thank you,” Kylie said.
    “You’re very welcome. Gosh but you look familiar.”
    “So do you. Goodbye.”
    Back in the car Kylie squeezed Toby’s hand. There had been a boy on the Outskirts. He was impotent, but he liked to touch Kylie and be with her, and he didn’t mind watching her movies, the ones that made the Old Men sad and angry but that she obsessively hoarded images from in her mind. The boy’s hand always felt cold and bony. Which wasn’t his fault. The nicest time they ever had was a night they had spent in one of the ruins with a working fireplace and enough furniture to burn for several hours. They’d had a book of poems and took turns reading them to each other. Most of the poems didn’t