Flame Test

Different elements burn different colors according to what energy level their electrons jump to when excited. The flame test introduces a sample of an element or compound to a hot, non-luminous flame to determine the composition of a material.


I. Lithium

Lilibeth was not the kind of person who rushed anywhere; she liked to take her time. It was a habit she had slipped into with age and an increase of free time. The journey, she told Mary, is just as important as the destination.

Today she was rushing.

The hospital where Lili’s first grandchild was due wasn’t far from her apartment, so she didn’t bother to take a cab. It was early enough that only a few cars were on the street, and even fewer people. A thin fog hung over the ground, fanning out gently into the morning. She breathed it in, passing the still-closed doors of shops and banks without a glance. As she walked she pulled her sliver-gray hair back into a ponytail. She’d been in such a hurry that she’d forgotten, just stepped out with her phone and keys and favorite red purse in one hand and a rubber band in the fingers of the other.

A block away she picked up her pace, brushing past the man standing on the corner and stepping onto Third. The light was against her, but she was paying enough attention to know that there weren’t any cars coming. In her head she was going over her favorite baby names: Benjamin for a boy, and she couldn’t decide between Tracy and Sarah for a girl. Mary had said weeks ago that she liked the name Jennifer, but Lili was sure a shorter name would be better.

Behind her, the man she had just passed called, “Ingrid,” to someone across the street. It wasn’t startling, just street noise. “Ingrid!”

Out of the corner of her eye Lili saw the young woman who answered him (“…Nick?”) standing cater-corner on the intersection. The twitchy look of her fingers, as if she would start wringing her hands any second, reminded Lili of Mary.

“Where have you been?” the man yelled to her.

Lili stepped onto the opposite curb. “Excuse me,” she said crisply, moving around a pair of people who had crossed the street in front of her who, on this morning, were walking too slow for her taste.

She almost added, I have a newborn grandchild to see! But one of them was saying, “With a calculator,” to the other, and she felt it would be rude to interrupt their conversation. Don’t interrupt, she always admonished Mary, don’t ever interrupt other people.

There was a shriek behind her. Lilibeth paused to glance back, past the couple, who were looking as well, left of the man who’d been yelling across the street and now appeared startled, to where a girl in a white hooded sweatshirt lay on the pavement in the center of the cross street. She stared for a few seconds, then continued on her way.

After all, her new grandbaby was more important. Even if it was a bad fall, she should learn to be more careful.

II. Iron

It only took two rings for Frances to answer her phone. She had been expecting the call, and answered it without slowing.

“You got my message?” she asked immediately.

On the other end of the line, her friend Jake sighed. He had the bad habit of holding the phone too close to his mouth, so his breathing was constantly audible. “Yeah. How is she?”

“Not so great, I think.” Frances checked her watch. “She called me fifteen minutes ago and asked me to come over.”

“What? This early?”

Frances pursed her lips into a thin, pale line and watched the sidewalk pass by under her feet. None of them were morning people, but Frances Elena was not above making an exception for the death of a friend’s sister. She hadn’t even taken much time to eat breakfast, just grabbed the half-empty carton of orange juice from the fridge and hastily drained it before going out. “I don’t think she ever went to sleep. Jake…”

“Yeah?”

Someone was coming up behind Frances, and she shifted away from the center of the sidewalk to let a girl in a white hoodie with a textbook under her arm pass by. The text was the same biology book she had used in a community college class last year –different edition, though. It was an odd sighting; made her feel older than she should.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said to Jake. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Anything,” he answered. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you’re there for her.”

Frances glanced at the girl with the textbook, who was walking forward with quick, single-minded determination. “No, there’s something she wants to hear.” She glanced away towards the street. “There’s always something somebody wants to hear.”

There was no traffic. Frances paused at the side of the road, looking both directions anyway. Down the street a guy yelled, “Ingrid. Ingrid!” and someone else yell, “Nick?” but she couldn’t see or hear any cars.

“Listen, I’m almost there,” she told Jake. (She heard the guy on the corner yell, “Where have you been?” and continued with her own conversation.) “I’m right across the street from her place. I gotta go.”

He yawned loudly into the phone. “Good luck. And hey – next time you call me this early, don’t expect me to call you back for a three minute conversation.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.” She crossed the street and paused in front of the apartment building, looking up.

“I mean it though,” he added, no longer teasing. “Just be there for her. Help her get through it. It’ll be okay.”

Frances was about to reply when she heard a shriek from down the street. She craned her neck and saw a few people standing in the crosswalk at the intersection. The girl in the white hoodie was on the ground, but the scene was too far away for Frances to distinguish much more than that.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “Talk to you later.” She snapped the cell phone shut and slipped it into her pocket, but stood there watching what was going on. After a moment she shook herself – rubbernecking, that’s all it was, and that never helped anybody – and went inside to talk to her friend.

III. Sodium

He carried one of his own business cards around every day, separate from the stack he kept in his briefcase for distributing to new acquaintances. On one side of the yellow card paper, it showed a large crease and the printed information of Nicholas Alan, a computer engineer turned middle management at a company specializing in sealed programmable logic arrays. The other side had a pen doodle of a young man and woman walking hand and hand, grinning, and was signed “Love, Ingrid” in small, loopy handwriting. Three weeks ago, after almost a year of sleeping together, she had told him she loved him.

Nick hadn’t seen her since.

Sometimes he thought he did. He’d come out of Starbucks with his cappuccino and see her fly past on her bicycle, or ride the subway home and catch a glimpse of her on the platform just as the train was pulling away. But she never answered the phone anymore and he was uncertain of what might happen or what he might find if he knocked on her door. Nick didn’t like uncertainty. He preferred black and white, works or doesn’t work, sold or not sold. This in-between was costing him sleep and the ability to concentrate at work.

A whole three weeks. He walked along the street with his head down, fingers clasping and unclasping the creased business card in his pocket, wrapped in thought. If he had been quicker to say “I love you” back, if he hadn’t believed her when she’d left so abruptly the next morning saying she’d meet him for lunch like she always did, if he hadn’t assumed she just wanted some space and waited a few days before trying to call.

It was hard not to let the ifs turn towards her (if she hadn’t, if she would just). Nick forced them out of his thoughts, and would continue to do so until he saw her one more time.

He stopped at the corner and checked for cars. It was automatic, even though the streets were usually empty at this time in the morning. He froze halfway through scanning the intersection and stared. Blinked. Continued to stare.

She was standing right there on the far corner, waiting for the light to cross. It really was her this time – no one else had that same blue, age-stained messenger bag with a strap made of paper clips and rubber bands.

“Ingrid,” he yelled, without pausing to think. He saw her jump, saw her fingers twitch and tighten around the makeshift strap as soon as her eyes found him. “Ingrid!”

A man, one half of a couple, bumped into Nick as they passed. “So… that’s… nine-ish?” the woman asked. Nick didn’t care.

“About nine point eight six,” the man replied with a laugh. “How did you get through AP Calculus, genius?”

It was so easy for other people. They talked, they heard what each other were saying. They could joke comfortably about nothing and loving or not loving wasn’t a topic that had to be brought up. Nick glared at them, but they didn’t notice.

Across the street, Ingrid turned toward him and visibly forced herself to stop clutching her bag. He remembered her once saying that it hurt her hands to do that, but it was such a habit.

“Nick?” she called cautiously, as if she were hoping it wasn’t really him somehow.

He took a deep breath. He’d wanted this, he’d wanted a chance to talk to her, but now he couldn’t think of anything to say. “Where have you been?” he asked. This was not a conversation that should be yelled from one corner of the intersection to the other, but he felt as if any movement at all would end even that feeble attempt. A girl with an armful of books darted in front of him to cross the street; he wondered how much of an idiot he looked to her.

There was a long pause, which wasn’t really long at all, during which Ingrid looked like she might say something, or take a step. But the next thing Nick heard was, “You shouldn’t stand in the middle of the—” to his right, and his eyes flicked over distractedly just in time to catch sight of the girl who had just passed him collapsing in the street. He knew that Ingrid saw her too because her hands flew to cover her mouth; their eyes met, and Nick wished he knew what the hell was going on.

IV. Thallium

She hated being called Ms.

“Ms. Lord, we need you to come in and sign these forms.” “Ms. Lord, we need permission to put her on a respirator.” As if the two-word cushion of her name could make the reality of it less harsh, as if it could make it any less inconvenient. Miss wasn’t any better. She always told the nurses to call her Tamsin, not because she wanted anything more personal but because the false respect was nauseating.

This morning it had been, “Sorry to call you this early, Ms. Lord, but your mother is passing on. You should come as soon as you can.” She hadn’t bothered to respond, just thrown an old green sweater on over her t-shirt and pajama pants and stormed out of the house. So what if it was a five mile walk? Distance was relative. Time was relative. Dying was relative. Her mother had been dying by pieces for so long that it didn’t matter what kind of cancer it was any more. Pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest, renal failure, and finally the liver was going, not because of cancer but because of the treatments. Tamsin had been given so many opportunities to say goodbye, and she would have been a fool to waste any of them.

It was almost a relief.

Tamsin walked quickly, kicking at empty bottles and bits of discarded newspapers, but that didn’t help. Ms, Ms, Ms, Ms rang in her ears and the need to get it over with settled deep in her stomach, shifting and jabbing at her insides with every step. But what was so wrong with that, she asked herself. Five years of this crap was enough for anyone. Only the hospital employees seemed untouched; they were desensitized. She was close to her destination when two people passed her, and she caught some of their conversation: “On a scale of one to ten, how hard is it?”

The first thing that came to her mind was the pain scale. A good day was a seven. But of course that wasn’t what they were talking about.

“It’s…” The man paused, playfully thoughtful. “Pi squared. About pi squared.”

Tamsin scowled. She glanced both ways down the street, which was deserted, and jay-walked, just to get away from that inane conversation. Some people were yelling at each other from different corners of the intersection ahead; background noise. She checked her watch. It had been two hours since she’d left home, but she was almost there.

Her steps quickened as she got closer to the intersection. There was more yelling, which she ignored, and more people at this time of the morning than she would have expected. Tamsin brushed past somebody in a ridiculous purple hat, snapping, “Watch where you’re going!” and crossed the street.

Somewhere behind her someone said, “You shouldn’t stand in the middle of the—” It cut off with a thud. Tamsin glanced over her shoulder and saw a kid collapsed in the other crosswalk.

She hunched her shoulders, faced forward, and kept walking, Ms, Ms, Ms, Ms still ringing in her ears.

V. Indium

Ingrid had always been a quiet girl. She was more comfortable silent than speaking, and so as a child had started hiding in her sketchbooks.

So why had she said it?

She’d been biting back on the words since the first time he’d kissed her – a year ago next month. It always felt too soon to reach that conclusion, and she was terrified of being wrong.

Nick, I love you.

People said a lot of things about love, but most often they said you just know. Ingrid always wondered about the margin for error in that. What if it was just wishful thinking? What if it was just speaking in the moment? What if it was just that he was her first? Any of those – or all of them – made such a statement meaningless.

The words had come out and her insides had been knotted ever since. She had neither heard his response nor caught his reaction, but existed in a daze until she found herself alone and back in her own, tiny apartment.

Nick, I love you. She couldn’t face him after saying that. What if it wasn’t true? How was she supposed to tell? It had been twenty one days and she still didn’t know what to do.

Ingrid watched her feet as she marched down the sidewalk. She took her hands out of her jacket pockets to press the button for the crosswalk and rubbed them together in front of her mouth, trying to regain some warmth. Her gloves were on the coffee table in Nick’s apartment. As she waited for the light to change she played with the homemade strap of her blue messenger bag (the original strap had disintegrated a few years ago), lifting it with her fingers so her shoulders wouldn’t bruise.

“Ingrid. Ingrid!”

Her fingers tightened around the strap, and if it pinched at all she didn’t feel it. There he was, standing on the far corner of the intersection. His eyes shifted from her to the people walking past him and back, never staying on one thing for very long. It made her feel vaguely ill. Nick, I love you. It was such a dangerous thing to say. What if it turned out to be unrequited? What if all this time he’d thought they were just ‘friends with benefits’?

“Nick?” she called shakily back to him. It was the first thing she’d said to him since Those Words. She wished more than anything that there was traffic to smother their words with street noise, to give her cover so she could slink away.

She couldn’t read the look on his face. She never could, even when he was close enough to touch, just like she could never understand what he meant whenever he told her about his work. Expressions, computers – she didn’t know how to speak those languages. “Where have you been?” he yelled.

Ingrid’s fingers tightened even more. Why was he asking her that? Was he angry at her for disappearing? Didn’t he understand why? Or was it that he did understand, and missed her? She opened her mouth to say something – she didn’t know what – but all that came was air. A flash of white caught her eye and her mind seized on that because it was definite, not a question. She looked just in time to see.

A girl in a white hoodie, a few years younger than Ingrid and probably still in college, stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. Another woman, this one wearing a distinctive purple fedora and crossing in the other direction, was just passing her when the girl’s legs folded beneath her. A thick textbook landed on its spine and fell open as the woman tried to grab for the girl’s arm, but she missed. The girl hit the pavement first with one knee, then with one shoulder and the side of her forehead, and crumpled on the ground, twitching.

Ingrid’s hands flew to her mouth and pressed against her lips to keep from gasping. Her eyes met briefly with Nick’s again.

Nick…

Is there anything I can do? she wondered. The thought was immediately followed by, I don’t know how.

VI. Sodium Carbonate seen through Cobalt Gas

Before Natalie married Collin Orit and changed her last name to Colbert-Orit so her readers wouldn’t get confused, they’d gone on long walks, arm in arm with no particular destination, talking. After the honeymoon she had needed to work night and day to meet her deadline for her next novel, so they’d fallen out of the habit.

One morning they both woke early, as was the new routine, and realized they didn’t have anything terribly important to do; Natalie had just finished revising her third draft and sent it to the publishers for approval and Collin’s last showing for a month had been the night before. He looked at her, and she looked at him, and they both reached for their sneakers and sweatshirts.

“Man,” he laughed as he locked the door behind them, “I can’t remember the last time we did this.”

“We talk about it a lot,” she offered.

“Sure we do, but we never have time.” He waggled his eyebrows up and down at her. “Our lives have taken over our lives.”

They stepped onto the sidewalk; Natalie turned right and Collin followed automatically. It was the kind of morning she knew he loved, foggy enough to fade the lines of everything without obscuring the view. She loved it too, the way the damp air pressed against her skin and cool white veils pressed at the edges of the senses like ghosts. Refreshing, that was the word for it.

She reached over and linked her fingers with his. “You’re right. I missed this.”

He squeezed her hand. “This?”

“Having some free time.” She sighed. “God, I envy you sometimes.”

“Oh?” he asked, laughing. “I have just as many deadlines as you do. I have an agent, just like you do. I don’t have to talk to publishers, but I do have to deal with snobby art collectors—”

Natalie swatted his shoulder with her free hand. She’d missed this kind of teasing, half-sarcastic conversation. Sometimes it didn’t feel like they were newlyweds at all; they’d gone straight from the reception dinner to meals shared but practically inhaled, and then off to the next thing. It wasn’t all that different from when they’d been dating in college – practically living together, but without the joint bank account.

“I meant,” she said, grinning. “I meant, you get to move around more. Painting, drawing, any of that, is a physical activity. Typing on a keyboard, not so much.”

“It’s just as hard, trust me.”

Of course she knew that. She watched him sometimes, during the five minute breaks she allowed herself when the sentences stopped flowing as fast as they needed to and her head was going to implode. The puzzles of color and marks he put together to form a picture were so insanely complicated that she often didn’t understand them until she saw the finished product – and then everything, every twitch of the brush or pencil or pastel or chalk, made perfect sense.

But taking a mini-vacation down the almost empty streets called more for playful banter than agreement, so she said, “Oh yeah?”

Collin quirked an eyebrow at her, sensing a sort of challenge coming. “Yeah.”

She smirked and sped up. He quickened his pace to match hers and she sped up again. They breezed past a woman in a baggy green sweater – something Collin noticed because it was the brightest color he’d seen since leaving their apartment.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Natalie said, without letting any of the physical exertion creep into her voice, “how hard is it?”

“It’s… pi squared. It’s about pi squared.”

Their hands were still linked and swinging at their sides. Collin bumped into someone as they reached the corner, and would have apologized if Natalie hadn’t been pulling him towards the crosswalk so quickly. A second later it didn’t seem to matter anyway, because the man was yelling to someone across the intersection: “Ingrid. Ingrid!”

“So, that’s… nine-ish?” Natalie asked.

Collin moved his attention back to her and smirked. “About nine point eight six. How did you get through AP Calculus, genius?”

He looked both ways before they crossed the street, because one never knew what might happen in crosswalks, but she didn’t because she didn’t hear any traffic noise and knew that almost no cars were out this early. The person the man had been yelling across the intersection to responded with a somewhat feeble, “Nick?” “Where have you been?” the man yelled back.

When they reached the far curb she let them slow down (a woman with gray hair and a red purse passed them with a crisp, “Excuse me”) before replying. “With a calculator,” she said, deadpan.

They heard a shriek and turned to look, and the joking drained away instantly.

Natalie paled. “You know CPR, right?” she asked, tugging on his hand. “You took that class back in…” It had been some time in college, she couldn’t remember which year any more. When he nodded she gave him a push in that direction. “Go.”

VII. Potassium

A smile could be a deceptive thing. It could hide irritation, anger, discomfort… and what people often failed to realize was that it could also hide affection, longing. The key word was could. Katherine had spent a great deal of time thinking about Addie’s smile recently. And it had nothing to do with last night. No, it had started months ago, wondering if – and it had been a silly thing then, but it wasn’t anymore.

It was one thing to wonder if her friend had a crush on her. It was another thing entirely after accidentally falling asleep on that same friend’s bed on night and waking up closerthanthis.

Katherine shivered, pulling at the brim of her hat and tugging her sleeves down over her hands as she walked down the sidewalk. She’d left home yesterday afternoon without a jacket because it had been warm at the time, then slept above the covers in a poorly heated room and was walking back to her building in the morning chill.

Sleeping over was completely unintentional. Completely. She had been tired, and Addie had suggested that she could stay, and none of it had been very surprising at all. It had felt okay. Not awkward or anything. And. And.

And. She could still feel the warmth of Addie’s hand resting on her shoulder, the brush of her breath against her face.

Katherine shivered again, staring at the tips of her sneakers as she walked down the sidewalk.

And didn’t it have something to do with wondering, for the past few months, if there was something there? Didn’t wondering at all mean she wanted something to be there?

If it was a crush, it wasn’t like any crush Katherine had ever had before, on a guy or a girl. She didn’t get nervous around Addie; her hands didn’t get sweaty. She wasn’t thinking melodramatically about what would happen if Addie didn’t like her. She didn’t even think it would be particularly awkward if she brought it up and Addie had no idea what she was talking about.

Katherine kept coming back to wondering about smiles and what they meant. What any of it meant. Was spending so much time together entirely friendship? Was immediately taking every invitation to play with Katherine’s hair entirely friendship? Was talking about orientation and bisexuality and the aesthetics of kissing entirely friendship? If Addie were a boy, the line between entirely friendship and something else would have been tangible. Instead the two were… well, the way they’d woken up.

The only way to know for sure was to ask Addie, and even though Katherine didn’t think it would be a bad thing either way she didn’t even begin to know how.

Ahead, a man was yelling across the intersection: “Ingrid. Ingrid!”

“…Nick?”

Distracted from her thoughts, Katherine glanced up from her shoes. She looked at the man standing on the corner and watched his mouth tense with several different things he might have said but didn’t. Eventually he settled on, “Where have you been?”

Maybe it just had to come out. Just like that. Not some big explanatory speech that ended with Addie I like you, but… something. No one was ever really eloquent, anyway; that was just in movies and books.

Okay, Katherine thought. I’ll just let things keep going like this until one of us says something. No planning, no worrying, no sweaty palms. She shivered again, and smiled. I think I already knew that, but okay. I have now officially planned to not plan. Spontaneity is totally my middle name.

She was pushing her hands back out of her sleeves to hit the crosswalk button when a woman bumped into her. The woman’s sweater scratched against the back of her left hand; Katherine caught a glimpse of dark shadows under her eyes.

“Watch where you’re going,” the woman snapped, and stepped around her. Katherine got the distinct, probably paranoid impression that she was glaring at her – or at her fedora, she couldn’t tell which.

The light was already green in her favor, though there were no cars around to make a difference. Absently rubbing the back of her hand, Katherine crossed the street. She noticed a girl stopped still in the middle of the crosswalk. It wasn’t anyone she recognized, but from the logo on her white sweatshirt they went to the same college. Katherine didn’t know this girl, but her eyes were glassy and she was breathing heavily as if she’d been running but wasn’t flushed – in fact, she was almost gray.

“Hey,” Katherine said, “you shouldn’t stand in the—”

The girl gasped and jerked forward, but her legs didn’t move with the rest of her body and she fell. Katherine tried to catch her but was too slow. She jumped at the combined sound of the girl hitting the ground and a textbook she’d been carrying landing on its spine.

A biology textbook, Katherine noticed pointlessly. She’d never taken a science class voluntarily.

Someone ran over and crouched next to the girl. “What the hell happened?” he asked hurriedly, turning her on her back.

Katherine blinked. Noticed that somehow her fedora had fallen off. “I don’t know. I… don’t know.” She picked up the hat and held it by the narrow purple brim. “She just fell. I don’t know.” And she thought, I miss Addie.

VIII. Light

The summer before coming to college she’d decided that she liked the German pronunciation of her name better, and explaining that the TH was supposed to sound like a T (Doro-TEA-a) had become almost reflex. Later that same year she was almost running down Third with a biology textbook under her arm, a scrap of paper peaking out from the chapter on natural selection.

Class started in a few minutes, and she too far away to make it in time. She checked the clock on her cell phone again and quickened her pace. There wouldn’t be a problem if she hadn’t slept in, and she wouldn’t have slept in if she hadn’t been so tired.

She’d made the mistake, when getting ready that morning, of feeling her forehead. But she wasn’t sick. She refused to get sick. It was probably just stress. Maybe for the past few days she’d been feeling like crap, but there was also that test to study for, those books to read before next week, that paper to write… There wasn’t time to be sick. And if her headache was any worse than it had been ten minutes ago, well, that was just her imagination.

Not many people and even fewer cars were out as she jogged down the sidewalk, her eyes fixed straight ahead and slipping into a weird tunnel vision. She heard vague clips of a one-sided conversation – “I don’t know what to do. what am I supposed to say? … No, there’s something she wants to hear. There’s always something somebody wants to hear.” – and some yelling – “Ingrid. Ingrid!” “Nick?” “Where have you been?” – as she started to cross the street, but the sentences didn’t register until a moment after she heard them. Not that they made sense anyway, those snippets of people’s lives she happened to be rushing through. She didn’t realize that she was sweating but still cold until she was in the intersection, when her legs started to feel like she was wading through sludge.

She stopped, and blinked at the vague purple shape moving toward her.

“Hey.” The face of someone her own age came into focus for a minute, looking concerned. “You shouldn’t stand in the middle of the—”

Dorothea’s intention was to start forward again and say, No, it’s all right, don’t worry about me, I’m fine, to this complete stranger. Instead, somewhere in there she tripped (over her own feet, though she would never have admitted it) and the words never came out. Right knee, then right shoulder, then forehead slammed into the pavement. I can walk it off, she thought, and then her eyes rolled back in her head.

Distantly, as if the morning air had solidified around her and she was experiencing everything through a layer of fog, Dorothea felt hands lifting her up, turning her over. She saw colors flash overhead, too fast to make out – shooting stars, or sparks. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and then they all blurred together.

I can still breathe, she thought.

Not Doro-THEE-a.

Not sick, can’t be sick, don’t have the time.

Not Doro-TAY-a.

I’m breathing.

Doro-TEA-a. I want you to say it that way. I don’t care what it’s supposed to be, that’s how I want you to say it.

I’m breathing, she told herself, but she wasn’t.

The purpose of the flame test is to demonstrate the nature of an element or compound. Once that has been identified the light is extinguished. After the test is complete, what else is it there to determine?