Father's Cube

Susan was turning the Rubik’s cube over and over, wondering how he could have known, how something lost for so long could drop back into her life—and what that meant, for good or bad—the morning her brother, Michael, walked out to the lake and was sucked into sky.

She was walking her dog when it started. Sunshine beat down on the sidewalk, warming her legs as she jogged over fallen green leaves. Dogs barked. Water rushed forth from hoses. Springman Avenue smelled of cut grass. Susan tilted her head back and breathed in deep; a smile crossed her face: Summer.

The man in the dirty beige parka was the first sign that something was amiss; the sudden half-dozen flakes floating down among the golden sun gleaming through trees in full-blown was another. Susie blinked, and the flakes were gone.

So was the man in the parka.

Susie blinked rapidly and laughed. More sleep, that’s what I need.

Her sister, Ruth, was flying in for the weekend. She’d just finished a third stay in the mental hospital and would be staying with Susie. So Susie had found herself squinting at the red digits of her bedside alarm clock while the wind played roughly with trees that had as much trouble getting to sleep as Susie had.

That was last night, but the warm breeze playing with her hair helped push Ruth from her mind. Brutus wagged along, took a squat, barked at strangers, chased after some critters Susie couldn’t see.

“Take it.”

His breath bit Susie’s neck, pricking the sweat and sending a barely-suppressed shiver up her spine. Brutus whimpered softly at her feet. The man gave one sharp laugh that sounded like a cough. She felt him draw closer from behind and had to warn herself not to run. Instead, her left hand fell into her left pocket, clutching for the pepper spray. And it all came back.

Her father’s rant kept playing in her mind, an old tape wound around wheels she couldn’t stop. He’s once spoken of a world hidden to those unwilling to see. Said the world was where they all really belonged: Susie, Ruth, Michael, their father, and the mother who threw herself off a cliff. Susie’s mom thought she’d land in the unseen world. The rocks below had other plans.

Susie’s father used to clutch a Rubik’s cube when he went on a tirade about the land of Daxadoon. He said you could only enter once you’d solved the cube.

“Every color must harmonize with every other,” and he said this while smiling with a faraway look to his eyes, carefully sliding stubborn colored squares.

The memory came back the instant Susie felt the cold plastic in her hand on that average summer day, the Eskimo still breathing cold against her neck. She started. The plastic was ice-cold, but the hand not holding Brutus’s leash was still in her left hip pocket, searching for the pepper spray.

She pulled her hand from her pocket. There it was: the Rubik’s cube. Susie turned fast, but the man was gone.

Susie went home and threw on the strongest pot of coffee she could muster. The Rubik’s cube, she set beside the TV. It would have been easy to dismiss it as just some strong delusion, to say that she found the Rubik’s cube and stuffed it in a pocket before her jog, but she wasn’t Ruth.

Ruth was coming.

The realization struck Susie in the middle of her third cup of caffeine. She slammed the mug on the kitchen counter and gave Brutus a long hug.

She heard the screen door fly open. By the time she made it to the living room, the door was snapping back shut, Michael’s slumped-shouldered outline retreating from her home. How had he known?

The missing Rubik’s cube made Susie’s mouth go dry.

“Michael! It’s just a toy!” she yelled after her brother.

“It’s the same one, Sue. We have to go. Now.” And Michael was gone, heading down to the beach.

She grabbed her keys only out of instinct and ran to find Michael. Screams met her on the beach.

“He fell into the air!”

“It was like a vacuum.”

“I know what I saw, don’t tell me what I saw. That man scrunched together real tight and just shot through this vortex right above the water.”

“It looked like he was floating in the air for a few seconds.”

Susie ran out to the water. Scanned the shoreline until she found the blues and the greens and the yellows lying forgotten in the sand. A little girl in a Dora the Explorer swimsuit plucked it up and started mixing the colors up. Susie ran.

“I need that. Now,” Susie said, eyes dark and hollow. She yanked the cube away.

“Mommy!” the girl yelled.

The little girl ran off to a woman in a large black sunhat. The woman made for Susie with fire in her eyes.

Susie quickly slid the wet blocks into place. The woman was within arm’s reach when the final reds snapped into place. Then Susie closed her eyes, stepped forward—and felt the ground leave her feet.

The air went hot-cold-warm. She could barely breathe as the humidity latched onto her lungs. She opened her eyes to too-black sky and shadows with old buildings smoking in stacks upon stacks of rubble down below. Her wings swept forth until they hung over her head like a makeshift hang glider.

Ruth.

Susie hadn’t managed to hold onto the Rubik’s cube. Ruth was the only one who could stop them, the only one that could ruin what Michael and Susie’s father worked so long to build. None of it mattered as Susie glided over the smoking ruins of the world where they truly belonged. She smiled and embraced the insanity.