This Is Only a Test

by B. J. Hollars

  I press my hand to the belly and close my eyes.

  Good one, sweetheart, I think.

  Bedtime Story

  April 2014

  Dear Daughter,

  Once upon a time many years back, the citizens of Eau Claire, Wisconsin—your future home—tilted their heads skyward and observed what they couldn’t explain. This was in 1870, back when lumberjacks still ruled the land and lived among the trees.

  But on this particular night all their axe blades stopped swinging long enough to take in the unusual sight: a light that resembled the northern lights but was no northern light. Not only did it inhabit the wrong section of sky, but its movements were unlike anything the region had seen. It was a core of light expanding like a halo, soon joined by a second halo, both of which merged to form a pair of magician’s rings in the sky.

  I suppose the details don’t much matter, dear. What matters is that the event was so mysterious that even the most grizzled lumberjacks were roused from their bunkhouses, forced to admit that even they—who’d seen it all—had never seen anything like that.

  As the sawdust began settling like snow, those lumberjacks crossed their arms, fidgeted, and ran blistered fingers through bushy beards to try to make sense of the message being sent.

  But what is the message? they wondered. And who is sending it?

  I’ve asked similar questions of you, dear, trying hard to decipher your message through the static of the ultrasound. But the signal always drops—your image never budges—and some part of you continually remains unknown.

  And what are we to make of that strange light in the sky? Well, it was different things to different people—a miracle, a mystery, a meteorological phenomenon. But it was the latter-most phrase that made it into the headline, a scientific catchall for the mostly indescribable event.

  However, the newspaper correspondent—whose job it was to describe—much preferred depicting that light as a mystery, revealing the way it spread slowly “like the moonlight coming through a cloud, or the reflection of a prairie fire, putting out the stars nearest to it.”

  I’ve read the article a dozen times, and still I shudder at the splendor of the language; how it helps me see what I was not there to see, helps me know what I could not know.

  I mention this because you are your own mystery, dear, and your message has only been half received. Which is why the doctors requested the second ultrasound, then the third, in the hope that we might get to know you better. Might untangle the wires, too, that have turned you to static on the screen; allow us to form a shape from your shadow.

  A few days back your mother, brother, and I saw another shape—a wild turkey—that I immediately read as a sign. A sign that assured me that you are all right, that we are all right, that we will all be all right together.

  It was Easter morning, and as your future family roamed the same woods those lumberjacks once roamed, the turkey in question clucked across our path.

  I identified it as such—“Holy crap, a turkey!”—though in the three seconds between my voice and your family’s reaction, the alleged turkey had already disappeared.

  Your two-year-old brother—his name is Henry, you’ll like him—turned to me with his toothy grin and tried to get the joke.

  “You crazy, Dada,” he laughed. “You crazy.”

  I am not crazy. I believed what I’d seen. And what I’d seen, I believed, was real.

  But enough about turkeys; let us return our attention to the bedtime story about people who lift their heads to the sky. I want to teach you to marvel at that which you can’t understand.

  Once upon a time, in July of 1860, while so many remained asleep in their beds, a landscape painter named Frederic Edwin Church propped his head up on his pillow to peer up at the sky. He was honeymooning in the Hudson Valley (I’ll explain when you’re older), though once the meteor procession began, he couldn’t help but reach for his sketchbook.

  Love lasts a lifetime, he probably thought, but meteors do not.

  And so that man sketched us the sky that night, tracing every trajectory so that we of the future might see what he saw in the past. Someday, dear, I’ll show you his painting. We’ll marvel at what we missed together.

  But keep this in mind, also: sometimes what we miss can be good. Just ask Ann Elizabeth Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, who once upon a time was awakened by a meteorite that struck her in the hip.

  Who can say how long it took for that meteorite to find her? To travel millions of miles—unbuckling itself from its asteroid belt—before hurtling through her roof. Who can say what convergence of events allowed for their collision, granting that poor woman the honor of being the first documented case of a human struck by a meteorite?

  Which makes her what exactly? Lucky? Unlucky? Or just a woman who could not avoid what the universe had in store for her.

  Here’s a bit of advice, dear: the universe always has something in store for us. Sometimes it’s a mysterious light; sometimes it’s a wild turkey. And sometimes it’s a collision of another sort, like the nursing student who, once upon a time a few weeks back, halted me in the student union.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but are you interested in saving a life?”

  Suddenly I was rubbing a cotton-tipped swab along my upper gum line.

  “Like this?” I asked, and she assured me I was doing great. So great, in fact, that she handed me a second swab, then a third, and finally, after swabbing all four corners of my mouth, she gathered my DNA into the test kit and thanked me for placing myself on the bone marrow donor list.

  “Sure,” I said. “It was nothing.”

  And it was nothing, especially if it might help save somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s somebody in need.

  Which is mostly why I did it. Because I wanted to help somebody in the hopes that one day somebody might help me. That, and I felt embarrassingly guilty for all the marrow I had sloshing about in my bones. As I rubbed those swabs in my mouth—locked eyes with that nursing student—the only person I saw staring back at me was you.

  Who, I wondered, would dare leave life to luck if he might leave it to karma, instead?

  And these days, dear, we needn’t leave anything to luck. Now we have ultrasounds, Dopplers, and DNA tests. We have tea leaves and divining rods. If we have a question about anything—landscape painting or the trajectories of meteorites—probably some app will assist us in finding our answer.

  For better or worse, we live in a world mostly without mysteries (you are the exception). But we didn’t always, and once upon a time even predicting something as simple as rain was somehow beyond our powers.

  At least until a man named Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort decided he’d had quite enough of feeling powerless. After decades of disasters from the sky, this man began launching weather balloons, measuring wind speeds and velocities in the hope of providing accurate weather predictions for the benefit of us all.

  Surely science can deduce the sky’s mysteries, the balloon man reasoned; surely science is the gospel truth.

  But he knew it was a false gospel unless scientists were willing to work together, to take their world and shrink it.

  And so they did, constricting the world in something called telegraph wire, using codes and clicks to warn others of the weather soon to come.

  In July of 1907—nearly forty years after those lumberjacks rubbed their bushy beards—the balloon man put his theory to the test, joining dozens of others across the world in a synchronized weather experiment. Kites flew in Hyde Park and Hamburg, in Strasburg, Simia, and beyond.

  From over twenty locations, these men pinpricked the sky, watched as their kites crisscrossed in the crosswinds like telegraph wire, lassoing the mysteries from above.

  But of course they couldn’t lasso all of them. Rest assured, there are still mysteries in need of unraveling.

  Like you, dear—your own mystery—and what are we to make of you, we who made you with the best materials we had?<
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  It wasn’t until midway through Mommy’s pregnancy that the doctors grew concerned by that which we did not know. Not terribly concerned, mind you, but concerned enough to ask for the additional ultrasound; and then, later, the additional-additional ultrasound.

  Just to be sure, they said.

  Sure of what? we asked.

  That everything is as it should be.

  Since my body is useless in helping Mommy’s body build your body, I tried offering myself to the universe, instead.

  Crack me wide, suck my marrow; take whatever it is you need.

  But I suppose there are always things we can’t control—not even with our marrow.

  After wasting a rainy afternoon in the grocery store, I buckled your brother into his seat as a young woman in a neon vest approached.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but do you happen to be the owner of this minivan?”

  My first instinct was to lie to her. To take a step back, give it a good hard look, and say, “You know, maybe this isn’t my van . . .”

  I had the sneaking suspicion, dear, that whatever she had to tell me wasn’t good.

  Perhaps I’d parked in a handicapped spot.

  Or perhaps she had news about you, had managed to translate a message beyond the mumbles of medical science.

  I nodded to her—“This is my van,” I said—and she opened her mouth to speak.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this . . .”

  Dear God . . .

  “. . . but one of the carts left a dent on the back of your van. I was pushing the carts and I left the dent—”

  Thank God . . .

  The young girl was college-age or close, freckled, wearing a headband that held every drenched hair in place.

  She escorted me to the back fender, holding her head low.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The mark was all but unnoticeable, not even a dent, just a scratch.

  I assured her it was fine. That we would be fine.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because you can tell someone.”

  “Don’t worry,” I repeated. “If you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have even known.”

  I waved, drove away, and in the rearview, caught a glimpse of her rain-dappled face.

  She is somebody’s daughter, I thought.

  Which is what I often think now when things go awry, when composition papers flutter in late or additional dings are added to the minivan. I remind myself that every woman is somebody’s daughter, dear, and every man is somebody’s son.

  And because of this—because everybody surely cares for somebody, or should—we should all care about probabilities as well.

  What’s a probability, you ask?

  It’s a way for grown-ups like Daddy to sleep easier at night, particularly when the numbers assure us that bad things will always affect somebody else. We needn’t fear meteorites, for example, when we know the low odds of getting struck.

  Then again, every time we speak of one-in-a-million odds, we should always consider the one, the Ann Elizabeth Hodges, who was minding her own business when the universe conspired against her. When she and a meteorite reminded the world that the crisis is always averted until it isn’t, that what ifs are always just that until they aren’t.

  The night before your final ultrasound, I ask the universe to conspire with me instead. I scan the skies for clues, but the stars remain mum, offering me little to go on.

  Following a restless night I wake early, and suddenly, the signs are everywhere: in the fog of the bathroom mirror, in the oil stain in the garage.

  There are too many signs, and so I shut out the world and open a book instead.

  I am trying to read my way out of disaster, I am trying to read my way out of disaster . . .

  But I’ve hardly cracked the spine of To Kill a Mockingbird before I find myself resorting to bibliomancy, stabbing at the sentences, desperate for one last clue.

  And finally, the clue emerges and clears up all that static.

  There, at the tip of my index finger, I read the words like tarot cards:

  “You’re a strong girl . . .”

  And suddenly I believe that you are; I can feel it in my marrow.

  Listen carefully now, because this is the last story I’ll tell you, dear, before you wake to this world.

  Once upon a time a daddy believed that a mysterious light was more than a mysterious light, that a meteor was more than a meteor. He believed in probabilities and prophecies, in wild turkeys and girls wearing headbands in the rain. He believed in the power and the glory of a quartet of cotton swabs, believed he’d glimpsed the future in a minivan bumper.

  Dear, you would never believe all the silly things this silly daddy believed.

  But he was not crazy because he believed what he’d seen. And what he’d seen, he believed, was you.

  WORKS CONSULTED

  Here is a selected list of works consulted and utilized throughout the included essays.

  BEDTIME STORY

  Hall, John. The Day the Meteorite Fell in Sylacauga. September 14, 2010. http://issuu.com/randymecredy/docs/_hodges_amnh_pdf_9-2010/1?e=2079579/4002986.

  New York Times. “Kites Are to Fly All Over the World.” July 15, 1907, 6.

  ——. “Meteorological Phenomenon in Wisconsin.” January 16, 1870, 1.

  ——. “To Predict Weather Months Ahead.” August 8, 1909, 1.

  DEATH BY REFRIGERATOR

  Adams, Cecil. “Is It Impossible to Open a Refrigerator Door from the Inside?” The Straight Dope. March 4, 2005. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2586/is-it-impossible-to-open-a-refrigerator-door-from-the-inside.

  Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. “Chest Freezer Safety Brochure.” Accessed April 1, 2015. http://www.aham.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/586.

  Campbell, Robert Jean. Campbell’s Psychiatric Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

  Dubuque Telegraph-Herald. “Refrigerator Death Traps.” Advertisement. July 4, 1976.

  Fodor, Nandor. The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning. New York: Hermitage Press, 1949.

  Karp, Harvey. The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Baby Sleep Longer. New York: Bantam, 2002.

  Kraus, Jeff. “Effectiveness of Measures to Prevent Unintentional Deaths of Infants and Children from Suffocation and Strangulation.” Public Health Reports 100, no. 2 (March–April 1985): 231–240.

  Lan, Russell. “Refrigerator Death Trap for 3 Children.” Meridian Journal. August 12, 1964.

  Ludington Daily News. “G.R. Man Is Arraigned in Refrigerator Deaths.” July 29, 1987, 1.

  Öst, Lars-Göran. “The Claustrophobia Scale: A Psychometric Evaluation.” Behaviour Research & Therapy 45, no. 5 (2007): 1053–1064.

  Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “Refrigerator Death Declared Accident.” July 15, 1967, 10.

  Toledo Blade. “Junk Refrigerator Death Trap for 2.” June 2, 1954, 2.

  Wikipedia. S.v. “Oliver Evans.” Last modified December 17, 2014.

  DISPATCHES FROM THE DROWNINGS

  Archimedes. “On Floating Bodies.” The Works of Archimedes. Edited by Thomas L. Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897.

  Bierens, Joost J. L. M., ed. Handbook on Drowning: Prevention, Rescue, Treatment. Berlin: Springer, 2006.

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Drowning Happens Quickly: Learn How to Reduce Your Risk.” May 2012. http://www.cdc.gov/Features/drowningprevention/.

  Drowning: Historical, Statistical Methods of Resuscitation. Boston: Lungmotor Company, 1920.

  Holy Bible. King James Version. New York: American Bible Society, 1999.

  Johnson, I. D. A Guide to Homeopathic Practice; Designed for the Use of Families and Private Individuals. New York: Boericke & Tafel, 1892.

  1911 Class Encyclopedia. S.v. “Drowning and Life Saving.” 11th ed. 1911. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6di
a_Britannica/Drowning_and_Life_Saving.

  Oxford Dictionaries. S.v. “Holocaust,” def. 1.

  Trelawny, Edward. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1858.

  Wikipedia. S.v. “Drownings at Nantes.” Last modified October 11, 2014.

  EPISTLE TO AN EMBRYO

  Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

  FIFTY WAYS OF LOOKING AT TORNADOES

  Bernard-Donals, Michael. “The Rhetoric of Disaster and the Imperative of Writing.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2001): 73–94.

  Branley, Franklyn Mansfield, and Leonard P. Kessler. Tornado Warning: A Booklet for Boys and Girls. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1981.

  Cobb, Mark, and Katherine Lee. “Shelters, Clinics Take In Displaced Pets.” Tuscaloosa News, May 1, 2011, 11A.

  Condra, G. E., and G. A. Loveland. “The Iowa-Nebraska Tornadoes of Easter Sunday, 1913.” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 46, no. 2 (1914): 100–107.

  Copley, John T. “The Movements and Forces in Tornadoes.” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 38 (1935): 213–215.

  Holden, Edward S. “A System of Local Warnings against Tornadoes.” Science 2, no. 37 (1883): 521–522.

  Landsberg, H. E. “Psychological Responses to Tornadoes.” Science 180, no. 4086 (1973): 544, 546, 588.

  Leighly, John. “An Early Drawing and Description of a Tornado.” Isis 65, no. 4 (1974): 474–486.

  Lemons, Hoyt. “Physical Characteristics of Disasters: Historical and Statistical Review.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 309 (1957): 1–14.

  Macfarlane, James. “Evidence of Unrecorded Tornadoes.” Science 3, no. 59 (1884): 346–347.

  Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser. “Rescuers Find Baby All Alone in Cotton Field.” March 23, 1932.

  Science. “Tornadoes, and How to Escape Them.” Vol. 4, no. 99 (1884): 572–573.

  Science News. “Tornadoes, a Mystery.” Vol. 91, no. 18 (1967): 422–424.