104
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 22
St r a n g e ly, t h e t w o b a b i e s wh o h a d o n c e b e e n
February 9, 1986 A not-so-bitter-cold day in Norwood, Massachusetts. A day forecasters predicted probabilities of sun, clouds, somewhat less than ideal conditions for viewing the magical passing of Halley’s Comet for the first time in seventy-six years. A day nine babies are born at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, in particular in the late morning a boy and a girl, their birth certificates matching, 11:01 a.m. After nurses’ wash-up the boy, named Horace after the ancient poet (and not after Walpole, the British writer and politician whose namesake town is ironically not ten miles from the hospital), is wrapped in a blue towel. And simultaneously, just down the hall and for lack of pink since the laundry cart was running late, again, the girl, Halley (named of course for her auspicious “star”), is also swaddled in a blue blanket. Neither nurse realizes until hours later that both initially had trouble ascertaining “eye color” for the certificate, and then that both had the same simultaneous experience of certainty. It was as if, the nurses would confide to one another later, the babies’ eyes had at first no color and then, all at once the most definite and lovely deep blue-green; as if the babies themselves had suddenly decided on a color, and when the two are placed side by side the eye color is not identical but somehow strikingly related, complementary. But Halley and Horace are separated soon after, and their respective parents, in such proximity all day, even pass in the hallways twice, but never meet.
o n ly mi l l i me t e r s a pa rt we r e , b e f o r e t h e i r f i r s t
b i rt h d ay . . . a b o u t a s fa r f r o m o n e a n ot h e r
a s t h e e a rt h a l l o we d . . .
2012
DorisBettsFiction Prize finalist
entanglement
At the end of one of these hallways, where two corridors converge, is a carpeted, chair-filled room. In it, several related people do what such places are designed for: they wait. A very old man in a flannel shirt leans toward a table lamp, reading a magazine through thick eyeglasses. Across from him, a couple of college freshmen, a boy and a girl, try to read a textbook and try to appear casual in keeping physical contact with one another. The elderly man, Everett Higgs,
Gregg Cusick’s stories have twice received second place awards in previous Betts competitions and have been published in NCLR 2008 and 2009. NCLR Fiction Editor Liza Wieland said of her selection of this story as a finalist, “I admire ‘Entanglements’ for the way it caused me to reexamine my ideas about what makes a story. This piece illustrates the complex relationship between plot and coincidence, and yet the characters are fully realized. It’s a brief but useful and intelligent lesson in fiction writing, and I hope to (with the writer’s permission of course) use it in my classes.”
b y G r e gg C u s i c k
with art by jon kolkin is the girl’s grandfather, and she alternates between covering her physical attraction to her boyfriend and flaunting it. In a room down the hall, Etta Higgs lies in a coma from which she probably will not awake. But her breathing is smooth and even, and her fall oak-leaf skin shows high color. Her eyelids ripple slightly at the movement behind them. Even in sleep, Etta seems busy. Impatient for the start of visiting hours, Everett reads with difficulty from a journal called Tomorrow’s Science. Given his wife’s circumstances, he is naturally distracted, and of course he’s not a perfectly fit fiddle himself. He battles vertigo and sometimes disorientation. He also suffers from a common and complicated malady he can only remember to call, generally, a heart condition. His weak eyes light on an article involving quantum theory – such a baffling term. About to turn the page, most of his mind on Etta, he reads:
Author’s Note: Quotations in this story come directly or are paraphrased from John Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2002) and Brian Clegg, The God Effect (St. Martin’s, 2006). The story’s author apologizes in advance for any misreadings of these sources.