Shadow of the Mothaship | Page 6

that bursts free, and *I could kick myself for an asshole!*
The house, now truly untethered, catches a gust of wind and lifts itself a few metres off the ground, body-checking me on my ass. I do a basketball jump and catch the solvent-melted corner, drag it down to earth, long-arm for the fix bath and slop it where the corner meets the driveway, bonding it there until phase four is ready.
#
I bond one end of monofilament to the front right corner of the house, then let it unwind, covered in eraser-pink safety goop, until I'm standing in my deserted Chestnut Ave. I spray a dent in the middle of the road with my solvent, plunk the reel into it, bond it, then rush back to the house and unbond that last one corner.
I hit the suck button on the reel and the house slowly drags its way to the street, leaving a gap like a broken tooth in the carefully groomed smile of my Chestnut Ave.
The wind fluffs at the house, making it settle/unsettle like a nervous hen and so I give it line by teasing the spit button on the reel until it's a hundred metres away. Then I reel it in and out, timing it with the gusts until, in a sudden magnificent second, it catches and sails up-and-up-and-up and I'm a fricken genius.
#
It's nearly four and my beautiful kite is a dancing bird in the sky before the good little kiddies of my Chestnut Ave start to trickle home from their days of denial, playing at normalcy in the face of Judgment.
Linus is the first one home, and he nearly decapitates himself on the taut line as he cruises past on his bicycle. He slews to a stop and stares unbelieving at me, at the airborne house, at the gap where he had a neighbour.
"Maxes Fuentes Shumacher! What is this?"
"Flying a kite, Linus. Just flyin' a kite. Nice day for it, yeah?"
"This," he says, then sputters. Linus is a big devotee of Dad's Process for Lasting Happiness, and I can actually watch him try to come up with some scripture to cover the situation while he gulps back mouthsful of bile. "This is an Irresponsible Wrong, Maxes. You are being a Feckless Filthy. This is an abuse of property, a Lashing Out at a Figure in Absentia. You are endangering others, endangering aircraft and people and property below that. I insist that you Right-Make this now, this instant."
"Yeah, uh-huh, yeah." And I squint up at my kite, the sun coming down behind it now, and it's just a dot in the big orange fire. The wind's more biting than friendly. I pull the foam sweater a little closer, and do up one of the buttons in the middle.
"Maxes!" Linus shouts, his happiness dissipating. "You have thirty seconds to get that down here, or I will Right-Make it myself."
I didn't live with my dad for twenty years without picking up some Process-speak. "You seem to be Ego-Squeezing here, Lin. This Blame-Saying is a Barrier to Joy, bud, and the mark of a Weekend Happyman. Why don't you go watch some TV or something?"
He ignores me and makes a big show of flipping open his comm and starting a timer running on it.
Man, my kite is a work of art. Megafun.
"Time's up, Feckless Filthy," Linus says, and snakes out and punches the suck button on my monofilament reel. It whizzes and line starts disappearing into its guts.
"You can't bring down a kite *that* way, frickface. It'll crash." Which it does, losing all its airworthiness in one hot second and plummeting like a house.
It tears up some trees down Chestnut, and I hear a Rice Crispies bowl of snap-crackle-pops from further away. I use a shear to clip the line and it zaps away, like a hyperactive snake.
"Moron," I say to Linus. The good kiddies of Chestnut Ave are now trickling home in twos and threes and looking at the gap in the smile with looks of such bovine stupidity that I stalk away in disgust, leaving the reel bonded to the middle of the road forever.
I build a little fort out of a couch and some cushions, slop fix bath over the joints so they're permanent, and hide in it, shivering.
#
Tricky-treaters didn't come knocking on my pillow-fort last night. That's fine by me. I slept well.
I rise with the sun and the dew and the aches of a cold night on a mattress of clothes and towels.
I flip open my comm, and there's a half-doz clippings my agent's found in the night. Five are about the bugouts; I ignore those. One is about the kite.
It crashed around Highway 7 and the 400 in Vaughan, bouncing and skidding. Traffic was light, and though there were a few fender-benders, nothing serious