Well it’s Friday and we’re doing it again! Over on Spoutible, I asked for one word prompts, and wow did you guys deliver!
With trickiness.
Nonetheless, I will do my best to weave your words into today’s post. I’ll put the list at the end, so as not to disturb the flow, and wish me luck because this one is going to be a doozy!
(It was even doozier than I thought! I hope you enjoy it.)
She found it odd, as she dropped the shot glass of whiskey into the beer, that the name of the drink–boilermaker–persisted despite the thing and the profession itself both being long lost to the centuries.
Or so she was told.
She gulped it down with a grimace, the taste still deplorable, even after all these years. What she wouldn’t give for a Sherry Cobbler, or even a half-decent cider, but apparently apples had also gone the way of the boilermaker.
Something horrifically boring about the seeds failing to disseminate in any other gravity aside from earth. Frankly she couldn’t be bothered to listen to what Raford, a lanky reed of a man with sly eyes and a rapacious smile, had to say. Though his timbre implied scintillating details, she kept her expression vacuous and eventually he stopped talking.
That, at least, was a skill that transcended the ages.
Seven years ago now, at least as she counted them, she’d been sitting in her back garden, awash with early spring, in the dress she considered her most frumpy as it lacked even a bustle. It didn’t matter, as there was no one there to see, aside from her lady’s maid, Sara, and a pelican who would visit from time to time for the fish heads.
The pelican was sitting on the post next to the squeaking gate, eyeing her, tilting its head, its orange feet splayed on the wood. In the breeze, with the new flowers showing off, the bird calmly resting, Cora enjoyed the freshness of solitude.
Until she didn’t.
With a swirling glow, a hole appeared before her to the right of the gate, as the pelican looked on mildly. The opening grew and expanded, a wavering sea of color like she’d never before seen.
Silhouetted against the light, a figure emerged, stepping forward as though over a puddle.
Sara. She was dressed bizarrely, wearing slacks made of a rough but durable material, her once neatly bunned hair now shorn short, its waves haphazard to Cora’s eye.
“Sara?” she said, reaching out to feel the odd fabric, as if something tangible would make the whole thing come clear.
“Ma’am, I’m so relieved to finally find you. Raford isn’t terribly good with his numbers, and it required multiple recalculations.”
“Finally find me? I just saw you here in the garden.”
“No, Ma’am, that’s five years ago now, for me, since Raford pulled me though–“
“Pulled you through? Pulled you through what?”
“This,” Sara said, gesturing behind her, “and I’m afraid I need to ask you to accompany us to the other side of it as well.”
“To where?”
“When would be the more accurate question.”
“Sarah, I’m uncertain about that of which you speak, but I am not enjoying this jape if that is what is afoot.”
“In about 45 seconds, a meteorite is going to hit the spot where you’re sitting,” Sarah moved forward and grabbed Cora’s hand, “which I know because I saw it the first time when Raford landed incorrectly and only collected me and not you. It took us five years, and it would have been sooner but unfortunately the mathematics involved were quite complicated and well beyond him.”
“Five years? You delivered this lemonade minutes ago,” she said, gesturing at the half-filled glass. “And what do you mean, Raford,” she dropped her voice in case he could hear her, which felt ridiculous, as all she could see were the strange circle and the pelican “you know he’s tantamount to my…nemesis.”
“That is not likely to change. But unfortunately he’s our ride and we need to go.”
Without any further warning, Sara pulled her up and hurried her down the garden path to the swirling mass. She turned to face her.
“It might feel a bit odd,” she said, “but that wears off. Eventually.”
“Eventually? How much time did it take you?”
“Still working on it,” Sara said, gently guiding her through.
“Your speech has become most peculiar, Sara,” said Cora as she moved forward with a strange floating sensation, the stars so bright and numbered she felt she was among them.
“More back to normal?” Sara said, as her boot clanked against dull metal, its surface covered in a lazy, raised crisscross pattern. Ahead stood a curved doorway on a dull brown metal wall. Above it read the letters “Existentialism Express.”
“What is that?” asked Cora as Sara led her onward.
“The name of the ship we’re on. It’s some kind of joke,” she said.
“I don’t understand it,” said Cora.
Sara dropped to a whisper, “no one does.”
She stopped walking, and they were in a room awash with flashing lights and beeps and colors dancing over walls. Disoriented and discombobulated, Cora grabbed the back of a frustratingly mobile chair for balance, when a sudden roar from the near distance cut through the low hum and they both flinched.
“Meteorite,” said Sara.
It was then that Raford sauntered in, his gangly limbs as awkward as she remembered.
“Cora,” he said, “I told you we’d meet again.” He flopped into a seat in front of a console, the chair slightly rotating from side to side, as he pressed something Cora couldn’t see.
“And I told you I couldn’t stomach your audacity,” she said, “without the understanding that it could be greater than attempting to go to a distant male cousin for my hand without my consent. Imagine my opinion now.”
“You know, the norms of your time period are really tricky,” he said, not bothering to look at her, “and I wanted to get you on the ship one way or another. So we’ll call Sara a happy accident.”
“Nemesis,” they said in unison.
“What’s that you said?” he asked, grabbing a sandwich next to the console, taking a sloppy bite, a splodge of some type of yellow sauce hitting the screen. He wiped it away with his sleeve, smearing it more than smoothing it. “I’m trying to log into the AusgezeichNet here.”
“The what?”
“AusgezeichNet. It’s the thing that runs everything.”
“Fine,” Cora said, “but why am I here?”
“Yes,” said Raford, “now you’re getting it!”
She stared at the back of him blankly, but the silence echoed.
“That’s the existential—never mind. Also, you’re welcome.”
“For what?”
“For not being squashed by a meteorite. That first time it was not pretty,” he said, the back of his head shaking left and right. He spun in his chair.
“Not pretty. But you’re looking a lot less…flat.”
“I’ll ask again. Why am I here?”
“Well,” he said, in that tone she’d come to despise over the next seven years, “that’s for you to discover.”
“It’s that existentialism thing again,” said Sara, rolling her eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You’re here because you’re here.”
“Can I go back?”
“Maybe?” Sara sat her down gently. “But you probably won’t want to. First of all, there’s the whole house taken out by a meteor thing. That’s relatively inconvenient.”
“True,” Cora said.
“Also getting to the right moment to get you was really difficult and we’ll probably have a time gap if we try to get back there, and do you really want to have to explain where you were for ten years?”
“But you say you were gone for five years and it wasn’t even ten minutes.”
“That’s time travel for you,” said Sara with a shrug. “It’s not predictable.”
And so it went, year after year, whatever that meant in that thing Sara had optimistically called a “ship.” What happened simply happened, and the universe, ever indifferent, simply carried on.
When she’d ask about the why, Raford would gesture knowingly at the name of the ship, as though it held an answer too obvious to be spoken aloud.
It wasn’t.
Obvious, that is, at least to Cora, now centuries out of her time with two people she thought she knew but never knew at all.
***
The words were:
Tangible, rapacious, discombobulate/d, pelican, vacuous, accurate, audacity, boilermaker, recalculate/d, nemesis, existentialism, splodge, ausgezeichnet, deplorable, scintillating, disseminate, frumpy, solitude.
A Bit to Read 
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