The French Girl has brought a pile of pamphlets from her father’s workplace for you to cut up for the project. You excitedly start to look through them, then feel disappointment. The robots that her dad builds are not like the ones on Buck Rodgers. These robots are car-sized wedges with single arms sticking out of them. These robots don’t have necks or eyes or even legs. Where are their mouths? They probably can’t even speak. How could they ever be good at communicating with aliens? What if you needed one of them to guard the door while you rerouted power from auxiliary resources to life support? What would a box with an arm do then?

“These robots build the cars, and then these robots,” she points at other blocks with single arms, “package Mars bars.”

You never liked Mars bars. A candy bar from Mars should be made of fantastic food items not found on earth. The texture of a Mars bar should be squirmy. The flavor of a Mars bar should change depending on what color the person is looking at while they chew. A Mars bar should be deadly unless eaten at a certain temperature and in a certain position to aid digestion. Mars bars should require special gloves and only be available in government institutions.

The French Girl says that she disagrees and that she likes Mars bars just the way that they are.

You tell her that you like pirates the way that they are, but if they had springs on their feet and could jump twice as high as normal men and rode around on laser sharks that would make them better.

The French Girl busies herself cutting out some pictures of the robots. You flip back through the catalogs and imagine these robots moving in perfect rhythm with a kind of waltz. You saw a bunch of robots like this once on 3,2,1 Contact. The robots were building kitchen appliances. There were still people standing around helping them. It reminded you of all the old people getting wheeled into and out of church during Sunday service.

You get bored and look out the window. The sky is the dusky amber color of another day in the dead of slurkan. Sometimes you wish you lived on a planet with less than seven seasons. The ice and cold of winter are depressing enough, but this following season when all of the fungi and decisiptible plants molt their falious skin membranes feels especially burdensome this year. Not a single person nor their loyal reghaudi servants are allowed outside the travel-chamber tubes during the variable seven-week ordeal. Of course it’s all in your best interest. The air during slurkan becomes thick and course like Antellian soup. To inhale the seed of nearly any plant on the planet Neaftipi is certain death. It’s only becomes a case of how slow that death will come.

“What do you think about now?” asks the French Girl. You have to reorder her words to figure out what she’s asking. She’s glued the robot to the poster. It looks kind of cool.

It’s hard to explain, you say.

Your father rubs his fingers along a reflective decal that he’s affixing to the window of your bedroom. The bubbles slowly work their way out from underneath it. The picture on the sticker is reversed, but you can see the firefighter and that it says “Baby In This Room.”

“I’m not a baby,” you say.

Your dad looks at you and says, “Well, yes, but son, we want the firefighters to know that, if there ever is a fire – which there will probably never be and you have nothing to be scared of – that they should break this window and save you no matter how hard this window is to get in to.”

Then he pulls a nail out of his pocket and starts nailing your window shut.Maybe you shouldn’t have slid down the roof last winter …

… nah. It was worth it. Next time you just need to know how to land.

Mom seems more intense than usual this morning. She leans against the wheel as she drives, her eyes scanning every bundled pedestrian. A cold autumn rain pelts against the windshield, each droplet intent on destroying itself throughly against the glass.

“Mom,” you say, “I have an art project and I have to do it with a girl from France and ..”

“Where in France?”

“Knowned.”

“Nantes.”

“Yeah! She’s from Knowned. And we have to work on a project together about our families. Her dad works in a robot factory and her mom teaches therapy and I told her that my dad works at a radio station but … what do you do?”

“I love you, and worry about you, and try to protect you,” she keeps her hands on the wheel. “That’s what I do.”

“I love you, too, mom. I know that, but what is your job? I mean what picture can I cut …”

“What do I do?”

The Ford Kuga glides to a halt at a stop sign. Your mom looks both ways then looks down at you in the seat next to her. You feel her eyes evaluating you through her dark glasses. Her thin pale lips form a twitching dask mark, but you don’t what words they are joining together.

“Do you want to know exactly what I do? Are ready to know?” she asks.

She pulls her sunglasses off, and you expect to see her motherly eyes, but instead you encounter harsh dark irises. You see the nighttime over the ice of Lake Michigan and cold nights waiting for her father to come home from ice fishing. She sizes you up. She wants to know your being. Answer her.

“Um … yes. I’m ready. Tell me! What do you do?”

She puts her sunglasses back on, released the brake and turns the corner without saying anything. You ride in silence. When the car stops in the front of the school, she grabs your arm before you leave.

“Next week,” she says, “I’m gonna have you walk the final two blocks to the school by yourself. Then you’ll find out what I do.”

“So son,” your Dad says, “I was sent this new album at the station last week. The press release calls this ‘alternative rock.’ They say it’s the next big thing with kids. I wanted to play it for you and see what you think. I can’t make heads or tails of it myself. Seems like starting in the late-70s nobody wanted to make a song with any meaning in it at all. I was ready for songs being angry when I got old, but not nothing. Seems like the songs get less meaningful every time I hear a new one. When I was a kid, rock and roll was shocking. It was in your face and it challenged you. This is just …”

You strain to listen to the odd music over your Dad’s rambling. If this is the future, if this is alternative rock, then you finally feel like you understand the other kids your age. This music makes sense to you. It’s fun and it’s funny. The melodies are little jokes of their own. The narrator is unreliable and suspect. You look forward to turning on the radio and hearing a lot of bands that sound like They Might Be Giants.

Doesn’t it seem like time drags in hospitals? The shortest little bits of time seem to drag out twice as long as everywhere else. You’d think everyone would be in a hurry and instead it’s as if everyone just woke up from a nap.

The nurse that wraps your arm waits forever as each strip of plaster soaks. The cast is warm against your arm at the beginning but uncomfortably cold before she finishes. You’ve been given a shot for pain, but you feel a sad embarrassment inside. Six weeks seems like an impossibility long wait to be able to use your arm again. You hope that the cast is off when swimming lessons start up in the spring.

Glum.

At least you don’t have to practice piano anymore.