| Austin Bunn. The Brink: Stories |
| 1 | Austin Bunn The Brink: Stories For my mom, who dreamed this first. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse — The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. |
| 2 | PHILIP LARKIN, "AUBADE" How to Win an Unwinnable War The catalog comes in a sharp white envelope, "PLEASE FORWARD" written in his father's cursive on the outside. Sam paws the return label, which reads, "Governor's School for the Gifted and Talented." The governor has noticed him. "Tell me it's free," Mom says. "Free would be nice." But Sam would do summer school even if he had to drain his savings account or extend his paper route. |
| 3 | He likes school — the sweet octane of highlighters, the systems of reward — with a pureheartedness most seventh-grade boys reserve for taking advantage of themselves. He skims the courses, Euclidean Geometry, Beginning Japanese, and stops at a "late addition." How to Win a Nuclear War. Suddenly, Sam knows exactly how he'll spend the summer. Tucked in his closet is a "go bag" with Band-Aids, sunblock, shin pads, and the cinnamon granola bars no one wants. |
| 4 | As far as he is concerned, nuclear holocaust is the only thing worth thinking about. Back in the winter, when Mom left his father and they moved into the apartment, she promised Sam a gift, a prize for coming. He asked for a plastic barrel to store fresh water. She bought him a fern instead, a fern now browning on the front stoop. According to Sam's estimates, Princeton, New Jersey, sits just outside the kill zone of Manhattan. |
| 5 | He has a chance of surviving. He and his mom have a distinct chance, and the idea that he could save people orients him like a polestar. The year is 1987. "Seriously? You want to take that class?" Mom asks, setting down her book, a hardcover for nursing school. The book fascinates Sam, the photographs of gashes and lesions and people with cowed, empty looks, as though no matter how pink or black the wound, no matter how dire, they still might yawn. |
| 6 | "This is your summer we're talking about." "But summer school doesn't cost anything. It's zero dollars," Sam says. He digs around in the box of Fig Newtons tucked next to her on the chair. One is left. That is their rule now, living together as a team. Leave one behind. "Promise me that when you find out how to win," she says, signing her permission, "you'll tell the governor. Tell everybody. Even if I'm not around." She will always be around. |
| 7 | That is the whole point of winning. "Now," Mom says, "go get us more cookies." The first day, Mom drives up the narrow road of the local college. Workers in white suits rip long strands of ivy from buildings, and Sam is reminded of that movie, the one about the war against the plants, the one where we lose but there is an island. "Your father will get you after," she says. "Don't let him take you to pizza again. |
| 8 | That's too much pizza happening." Then she pulls her lips over her teeth like she has no teeth and, with her pinkie, scrapes a neat edge to her lipstick. The blouse she's wearing, shiny and blue, is made from whatever hot-air balloons are made from. She wants to look pretty for someone, and Sam wants to tell her this is wrong. They need to go backward. They belong back with his father, at the house in the woods, with a basement and kerosene and a well, instead of the duplex apartment in town where, after the bombs, they could be forced to eat people. |
| 9 | She idles the car at the entrance to the hall, a stone building with a sign out front that says, "Gifted This Way." "No grades here, right?" Mom asks. "Right," Sam says, even though he wishes there were grades, the proof that he matters to an indifferent world. For the past year, he has had a problem with caring too much. A C on an algebra test made him weep. When the art teacher called his mug an "ashtray," he vomited. |
| 10 | Later, in his diary, Sam wrote, "MUST DO BETTER," and then practiced his telekinesis on a pencil, marshaling invisible forces in his favor. Mom brushes his bangs. "And tell your father you need a haircut." Inside, the conference hall has the carpeted, low-traffic feel of the Unitarian church where Mom now takes him — stacked folding chairs, chandeliers, the sense of things moved to the side to make way for more boring. |
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