Date of creation: 10/30/202435Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5ZG4l4ffWN
Word count: 2493 (Google Docs)35Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0Ahjwrvrjw
Author’s note: This was my entry for round three, part one. The prompt was to write a story about a character turning sixty-four based on a line in the song When I'm Sixty-Four by The Beatles, and the maximum word count was 2500 words. I chose the first line, which is the story title.
He thought he had it. He’d been so sure.
But an explosion was generally a bad sign, and as the smoke cleared, all that remained of his latest experiment was an empty blacktop lab bench and soot on his face.
Pipaluk’s shoulders slumped in defeat. Back to the drawing board.
The little man slid down from the barstool to the concrete floor, trudging across the basement toward the various easels, chalkboards, and whiteboards arranged around his desk. He dropped into his chair with a heavy sigh. The assortment of numbers, letters, glyphs, and stick figures made no sense anymore. He frowned, tapping a finger to his chin. Where did those smudges come from?
Oh, of course.
He removed his goggles and dropped them onto the rough wooden surface of his desk, scorched and gouged by countless experiments over the years. The patch of clean white skin around his eyes made his thick, round glasses pop out even more than usual. His pink irises trailed back and forth, reading each line of apparently incomprehensible calculations once, twice, three times. Where had he gone wrong? He’d reduced the quantity of fairy dust, and his new heat cubes provided plenty of power to speed up the process…
A raucous crowing broke the silence. His head whipped toward the source, an old-fashioned weathervane spinning rapidly atop its shelf next to the one small window above ground level.
“Blizzard!” the black metal rooster screeched. “Blizzard! Winds nearing speeds of—”
“Oh, shut it!” snapped the little wood canary peeking out of the grandfather clock. “Do you know what time it is? I’m trying to sleep before the next hour chimes!”
Within seconds, the basement was a mass of angry voices from assorted furniture and tchotchkes. Pipaluk removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. This wasn’t helping him think. But if there was a blizzard in the middle of summer, that meant his neighbor, Lily the snow witch, was having another tantrum, and it was all the more important for him to get this right.
The soothing sound of ocean waves and soft piano music rose above the cacophony. Gradually, Pipaluk’s past experiments fell silent. Most of them were accidents, but the sleep machine was intentional. He mentally congratulated himself for adding it to his collection of sentient objects.
“All right, that’s enough,” he called out.
“It’s getting late,” the sleep machine cooed. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for bed?”
“Another word, and I’ll unplug you,” he warned.
The ocean waves and piano music stopped.
He replaced his glasses and leaned back in his chair, this time studying the ceiling. It was remarkably clean for a basement, but then again, the feather duster had obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
“How bad is the storm?” he asked. “In a quiet voice, please.”
“Zero visibility,” the rooster clucked. “One foot of snow already fallen. Hail damaging trees and cars. Storm expected to lose strength after twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, that’s an improvement, then,” Pipaluk said brightly, straightening in his chair. His eyes scanned the lines of equations again. “Maybe I can dig my way out before Lily recovers on her own this time. How is our supply of ice seeds?”
“The poor dears aren’t doing so well,” a watering can answered in a motherly tone. “They do hate summer so. It’s very difficult to persuade the mature plants to reproduce out of season. But I’m sure this weather will perk them right up.”
“Yes, and we can thank Lily for that,” Pipaluk replied. He hopped down from his chair and picked up a piece of chalk, scribbling a new line of numbers across the closest blackboard. “Check my math,” he instructed the calculator on his desk, tossing the chalk back into its groove.
“You never were good at linear algebra,” the calculator grumbled.
Pipaluk, humming happily, ignored that comment. He went to a china cabinet and trailed a finger across the glass windows in the doors as he examined the vials within.
“He he he!” the china cabinet giggled. “That tickles!”
“Sorry,” Pipaluk chirped with a wide smile. He opened a door and removed two vials, and his smile faltered. One pale gray scale from her wings. One strand of slate gray hair. And he had no way to get in contact with that fairy to resupply.
What was her name again?
“Wow, you did it right,” the calculator announced, its metallic voice thick with sarcasm.
Pipaluk hummed his acknowledgement as he considered. These were the key ingredients. He’d never gotten anywhere close until that fairy appeared in his lab one night and gave him several samples of her dust, scales, and hair. This time, he had to get it right. There was no room for error.
He took the vials back to his desk and set them next to his goggles. After a moment of silent thought, he turned and went to the chest freezer in the corner.
“Let’s review,” he said out loud. “When a magic user expends too much magic, they show symptoms similar to people with anemia.”
“Or severe blood loss,” a syringe piped up.
“Or severe blood loss,” Pipaluk repeated, opening the freezer. His thick glasses fogged up immediately. “Fatigue, pale mucous membranes—”
“But they also get flu-like symptoms,” an old mercury thermometer volunteered, the silver line rising in demonstration. “Fever and muscle aches.”
“Yes, thank you.” Pipaluk found the tiny button on the right leg of his glasses and pushed it, but a sad whine was the only result. “Oh, that’s right,” he muttered, and then he raised his voice and called out, “Somebody make a note that I need to fix these.”
“On it!” a scratchy voice replied. His trusty pen. So reliable.
“Getting back on track,” Pipaluk continued, feeling blindly around the cold interior of the freezer, “it takes several days for the magic user to recover. The more magic used, the more severe the symptoms, and the longer the recovery period. Where are those seeds?”
“Take off your glasses,” something suggested.
“Oh! Right!”
Once he moved his glasses onto the top of his head, he found the little jar of seeds quickly. He squinted, but couldn’t quite make out how many there were until he returned to his desk and cleaned his glasses with his lab coat. And then cleaned the soot off of them with a handkerchief proffered by a helpful bureau.
“Now, magic users share a universal and extreme aversion to needles,” he continued, staring thoughtfully at the five seeds that looked rather like tiny ice cubes. “Based on all this information, I believe magic is a substance in the blood, and it has self-preservation properties.”
“You know how we could find out for sure,” a knife set interjected in a dark, ominous tone.
Pipaluk frowned at the wood block of cooking utensils, quivering with excitement. “We are not cutting anybody up,” he said sternly. “The Society of Mad Scientists denounced cutting such activity in its most recent newsletter, but even if it hadn’t, I am a mad scientist, not an evil mad scientist. If I were evil, most of you would be kindling by now,” he added, making a sweeping gesture with his arm to the room. “Moving on, there are several ways to tackle this problem. The first is to provide a boost to the user’s magic, similar to an energy drink. However, that could create a negative balance when the boost wears off, with potentially dire consequences.” He paused meaningfully. “Like death.”
“And we’re trying to help Lily, not kill her,” a wall calendar volunteered.
Pipaluk didn’t answer immediately. He stared sadly at the calendar, flipped open to December 2020 with a bright red circle around Christmas Day. Two smiling faces filled the red and green border on the top page, two women with black hair and icy blue eyes. The older woman, with enough crinkles and laugh lines to tell the tale of forty-odd years of joy, had her arm thrown around the younger woman’s shoulders, a slightly uncomfortable but still happy eighteen-year-old. Splashed across the bottom of the image was a text blurb saying “Snow Witches Do Christmas Better!”
“Exactly,” Pipaluk finally said. “We’re trying to help Lily.”
He tore his eyes away from the calendar and stared at his calculations with renewed intensity. “Now, another option is to provide a boost after the excessive magic use. Not necessarily a magic boost. This could be something that nullifies the symptoms so the magic user feels better, even though they still haven’t replenished their magic.” He sighed. “But knowing Lily, she’d overdo it, and we’d run into the negative balance situation again.”
“She’s very complicated,” a Rubik’s cube commented.
“Which leads us back to the only remaining solution. We need to create something that can replenish her magic more quickly. And, since we don’t know exactly what constitutes her magic, that means we need to boost her natural ability to create magic.”
He fell silent for a moment, recounting the five seeds, one scale, and one strand of hair again. There wasn’t any fairy dust left—at least, not in its own vial. He was hoping there was enough on the scale and the hair for him to work with.
“And the solution needs to be self-sustaining,” he muttered, tapping a finger to his chin. He hopped off his chair, grabbing a dry-erase marker as he approached a whiteboard. A stick figure lay in a place of prominence within a mess of differential equations, on its back with red x’s for eyes. He circled it and drew a line in and around numbers and symbols, ending with an arrow pointing toward a stick figure that stood upright with a big smile on its face.
“That isn’t math,” the calculator said crisply.
“It doesn’t have to be math,” Pipaluk replied brightly. “Wake up the cubes. I need all of them this time.”
“Isn’t that kind of dangerous?” a first-aid kit asked nervously as a broomstick tapped a specialized glass enclosure in the far corner of the basement. Inside, seven orange cubes stacked in a pyramid formation slumbered peacefully.
“Mad scientist,” Pipaluk sang out. He scooped up his goggles and the three containers on his desk, whistling a cheery tune as he carried them all to the blacktop lab bench. The broomstick adjusted its tapping to match his rhythm, and the light within the orange cubes grew brighter as they awoke. They, too, caught the beat, each bouncing down from the stack and hopping happily around the enclosure.
He needed to make something bigger, he thought, glancing over at the cubes. They had a lot of energy.
“Make a note,” he called out. “Bigger enclosure for the cubes if we survive this.”
“Got it,” his trusty pen replied.
“‘If we survive this?’” a stern feminine voice interrupted.
Pipaluk froze, his lips pursed in a whistle that died before it hit the air. The broom froze, too, as did the cubes. All eyes snapped to the wooden stairs.
“‘If we survive this?’” she repeated.
The first visible sign of her was the pink bunny slippers. Their half-pricked ears bounced slightly with each slow, purposeful step, the carefree smiles over the woman’s toes striking fear into the hearts (or gears) of everybody in the basement. Next was the fuzzy baby blue hem of her housecoat. Pipaluk’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he gulped. Quilted blue fabric; small, pale hands with nails chewed down to the quick; and finally, her face, covered in green face cream and framed by hair wound tightly around curlers.
“I-it was just an expression, h-honey,” Pipaluk tried, forcing a smile.
She marched straight up to him, placing her hands on her hips and glaring up at him with fierce brown eyes. He gulped again. Though his wife was a full head shorter than him, and he was only four feet tall, she was a force to be reckoned with.
“What about your family?” she demanded. “The children? Me? Would we ‘survive this,’ Pipaluk? Well?”
He licked his lips nervously. “The ceiling is probably explosion-proof?”
“‘Probably?’”
“...Mostly?”
She sighed and stuck a finger in the middle of his chest. “You’re not getting out of your birthday this way.”
He offered a weak smile. “I d-don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, scratching his head.
“Yes, you do,” she said, punctuating each word with another jab. “You’re turning sixty-four tomorrow, and you’re scared.”
“I-I am not,” he stammered, taking a step backwards, and then another.
“You are, too, and it’s just silly. I did not marry you for your money, you know.”
“Obviously,” an empty wallet chimed in.
“I married you because I love you,” she continued. “Your age didn’t matter before, and it doesn’t matter now.”
Pipaluk’s back hit the glass enclosure. “Um, h-honey—”
“So, stop whatever you’re doing and come to bed. You’ll have a clearer head after a good night’s sleep, anyway.”
“B-but—”
She sighed again and grabbed the top of his head. “I already know.”
His pink eyes widened behind his thick glasses lenses, and he grabbed the sides of his head, pulling down on his hair while she yanked up. He was too late. She yanked his spiky green hair clean off of his head, leaving him with a shiny, bald dome.
“Why did you do that?” he wailed. “And how did you know?”
She rolled her eyes and tossed the wig over her shoulder. “Well, for one thing, your hair is naturally blue. Unless you were dying it daily, your roots should have changed colors five years ago.”
Pipaluk watched the wig's trajectory in horror, unable to stop the disaster from coming. It all happened so quickly. The wig landed on the lab bench, knocking the jar of seeds over, which bumped the vial bearing the scale, which nudged the vial with the strand of hair. It fell to the floor, shattering the instant it hit the concrete. Fairy dust sprayed everywhere. It hit the glass enclosure, melting it instantly and letting the happy gelatinous cubes free. One hopped onto the lab bench, landing directly on top of the goggles, wig, seeds, and scale, and a blinding flash preceded a deafening boom and an explosion that shook the very foundations of the house. Pipaluk threw his arms around his wife, and she threw hers around him. They held each other tightly, eyes squeezed shut, hearts pounding, sending up silent prayers for their defenseless children upstairs.
When the smoke cleared, they were still there, both covered in soot amidst the biggest mess Pipaluk’s lab had ever seen.
The canary popped out of the grandfather clock. “Midnight! Midnight!” it cheeped.
The little woman with grime stuck in her green face cream smiled and shook her head. “Well, we survived,” she said. She placed a quick peck on his lips and added, “Happy birthday, Pipaluk.”
She led him by the hand to the stairs, and he followed in silence, staring dumbfounded at the debris.
Where were the cubes?
ns 15.158.61.6da2
