Charm City

Personal

Something strange has been happening to me for the last couple of months. Every time I open my front door, Baltimore is outside.

The first trees are starting to flower. Just like they do at home. Just like they do everywhere. The pattern of the seasons is tinged with strangeness, but the earth still tilts and turns and shows its face to the sun the same way. It doesn't seem possible.

It's not that I didn't know you had to move thousands of miles chasing this kind of work. It's more that I had opted out. Decided to be a lifer. Looked into down payment assistance to buy a little stucco house on a little street and get a little job and have a little garden. I'm too old and also too young to be here now.

But it's only been two months. One with furniture. And the birds finally found the seeds I left out for them in a little dish in my little backyard, beneath the little tree growing there. I'm missing you like I can't describe, but I'm not adrift. I'm here, in Baltimore. It's nice.

Professional

Cheap Thrills

I can't condone buying things on Amazon, but I can tell you our book Forces of Nature: The Women Who Changed Science is extremely on sale right now for about nine bucks, last time I checked, for the hardcover. It's a really nice book, that makes a nice gift.

I knew we'd make it to the bargain bin! PS if you see the book in the wild in a bargain bin PLEASE send me a picture.

New Audible Series by Leila McNeill

Speaking of Leila, we're still working together on some stuff that I'll be able to tell you more about soon. But in the meantime, she's just had a new lecture series come out on Audible about 10 of the lesser know women in the history of science, and the reasons we don't know as much about them as we should. It's 3 hours, perfect for working in the garden or deep cleaning the house if you're like me and cannot bear to listen to your own thoughts for more that a minute at a time. Listen to Leila's thoughts!

Want to chat about Hopkins?

Are/were you or someone you know affiliated with Johns Hopkins University? Do you have interesting tales to tell about your experience there? Want to do an oral history with me about it? I'm part of the team writing a new institutional history of Johns Hopkins for the 15oth anniversary of the founding. We'd love to talk to you about your time with JHU. We can even do it over Zoom, it's super easy! Shoot me an email at areser1@jhu.edu.

Confessional

(a new piece of flash fiction, just for you)

Night was falling and the shift was changing and no one noticed me go outside. I’d had to take the bibs off the dead body, and one of the heating elements was going out at the left knee. My base and parka were mine, the mask and bottle with the scuffed faceplate were Rick’s, from a long time ago.

The walk was almost barely too long, and I was late. The cold pressing in on my already ruined knee didn’t help my progress. Darkness crept between the hydrocarbon drifts that buckled the line of the trail. I wanted to get there in time because I felt like what I wanted to say should happen before, not after.

This wasn’t such a bad place. We had a lot of what we needed here, things you can’t make like gravity and pressure. So it was ironic how little of the stuff we could—did—make we were allowed to keep.That was the whole point of all of this. I turned to wave over my shoulder at a pale spear of light on the horizon, steadily brightening as the sky made way: the knife edge of Saturn's rings.

She and i had planned everything down to the second, and she was never kind to me about mistakes. So I didn’t have the time to spare that I spent killing the other woman with a rock hammer. I wanted to tell her what had happened, what I had done to get out. No one would ever know if I didn’t tell them: there’d be no stories left in whatever remained. I don’t know why I thought it mattered.

I was relieved that it wasn’t Rick who’d gotten between me and the hatchway. Rick had been a good friend, and I tried to think that he would understand what we were trying to do, even if I had had to do it with my hands instead of the bombs. But i knew it was different, and there was something kind of ugly about that.

I checked the timer and my position in my heads up and made sure i was still on the trail. It was fully night now, the lights of the refinery a kilometer south and no help against the thick air pressed in around me. She wouldn’t leave a light on for me at the anchorage either. Fat flakes of methane snow started to fall, melting on my faceplate into an oily sheen.

Rick has lost both of his legs two years ago in accident that killed four other people. The first time i was allowed to see him in the company hospital, he was bruised up to his throat, with clean white dressings bound to the place where his thighs ended. He got six weeks of disability leave, but no visa to recuperate somewhere, so he spent that time alone in the bunkroom. And then it was over and they put him in a too-small wheelchair and set him up on the picking line with wounds that would never fully heal. He had eighteen years left on his contract. He was twenty seven.

I didn’t know the woman I killed with the hammer.

The pain and cold in my knee was really slowing me down now. I was still a hundred meters from the anchorage, but I couldn’t see it yet. I could feel the prickling in my skin that let me know the frostbite was setting in and I was visited by a grisly image of the blackened flesh peeling off to reveal my kneecap, white as a tooth and gleaming. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.

There was no way to get everyone out first. There was no way to limit the damage or contain it to unoccupied sections. There was no way to save them, not if we wanted this to work, if we wanted anything to change. That’s what the people who brought the bombs told us and that’s what we had to believe.

I didn’t make it in time. It didn’t matter.

The refinery went up and hot orange light flooded the trail. The anchorage was ahead, its cable ripping a black seam through the glowing clouds and into orbit. I lay down and buried my face in the ground as the shockwave passed and broke against the base of the elevator. It didn’t even shudder. I was thinking of just staying there, on the ground, eyes pinched against the glare. I thought about Rick and the woman and the hammer and the men who showed me how to solder the circuitry inside the bombs. The busted bibs would give out eventually. The mask and bottle maybe even faster. I’d just go to sleep and suffocate and freeze and it would be more than I deserved.

She hauled me up by my armpits and half-carried me into the anchorage and into the elevator car. It seemed to me that she threw me to the ground, which felt fair. Everything was blurry. The methane was evaporating off my face mask, and my eyes were clouded in tears I couldn’t wipe away. The car started climbing, the acceleration forcing a sob from my chest.

I tried to whisper my secret, but she had turned her comms off.

***

Smell ya later!