Mysteries of the Universe Roger Hart – First Place Contest Winner
The premonition hits as I walk down Park Street to the university. One foot up in the air and bamm! Knocks me back like a punch in the gut or a mysterious pain in the chest. A premo that sends a chill down my spine despite the warm spring morning. I try to shake it off. I have things to do. Crows squawk in the maples and oaks, a holy racket. In the distance the university band rehearses for the halftime show of the first home football game four months away, another holy racket. The smell of fresh baked bread and donuts drifts from Sweet Melissa’s Bakery on Lake Avenue. I try to wash the ugly inkling, the déjà before the vu, out of my mind by concentrating on the cottonwood fluff floating in the air, the noisy crows scolding me, the fat dandelion blossoms blanketing the lawn. A large limb from a sycamore tree has fallen across the sidewalk in front of the physics lab. The dew-covered grass in the shade of the red bricks and ivy of Rodman Hall needs mowed. Cleaning up downed limbs, mowing, trimming, mulching flowerbeds, seeding the muddy areas around the greenhouse. Maintenance stuff. My job. Need to get everything looking tiptop for graduation. The premonition gnaws at the sunny day. It’s a dark thundercloud threat just over the horizon, lightning flashing, thunder booming. I hope it’s a false warning, a fake forecast. I’ve had a few, both good and bad, fake and not. Take the one when Sloane and I were camping in the Boundary Waters, our first date, although we didn’t think of it as a date. We’d known each other three weeks. Morning fog blanketed the campsite so thick we couldn’t see the water a few feet beyond our beached canoe. Dew dripped from the needles of the pine trees, landed on the rocks with little plops. I closed up the camp stove, and we took our cups of coffee inside the tent, sat on our sleeping bags with Yogi hunkered down bear-like between us. “A moose,” I mumbled a few minutes later, just as the coffee was beginning to cool. “What?” Sloane asked. “Outside the tent,” I said. I hadn’t heard a thing, no hooves crunching on pinecones or sloshing through water, no chomping of aspen, no snorting. Pure premonition. Sloane gave me her Ph.D. in theoretical physics look. I couldn’t even recite the title of her doctoral thesis, which had something to do, she explained, with cosmic rays called Oh-MyGod particles. I had no clue what Oh-My-God particles were despite her attempts to explain, but I took comfort in her admitting
no one else knew much about them either. Sloane says spacetime is curved by gravity and that virtual particles pop in and out of existence, but she doesn’t buy into premonitions, prophesies, omens, or signs. Holding onto my cup, I crawled to the tent flap and flipped it aside. Ten feet away and staring at our red canoe was a giant moose although, I guess, all adult moose are giants. I touched my finger to my lips and pointed. Yogi, curious but cautious, watched, sniffed the air. No growl or bark. The moose grazed around our campsite then stepped into the lake and urinated, which sounded like a bucket of water being dumped or a waterfall dropping from a respectable height. “Premonition,” I said a bit smugly. Sloane shook her head. I tried throwing a little of her theoretical physics stuff at her. “Didn’t you tell me yesterday as we were paddling across the inlet that quantum things in the future can influence the present? Maybe the future moose in front of our tent signaled it would be there.” Sloane smirked. “Future events influencing the present is only true in the quantum world,” she said. Sloane is driven in an indoors/office/journal reading sort of way. Although she had traveled to conferences in several countries and a dozen major cities, this was her first camping trip. I wanted to ask how one thing could be true in her quantum world and not ours, but the moose had moved on, and she was packing up, preparing to move out. Later that day, the moose day, two young women wearing nothing but hats paddled by us, which has nothing to do with this story. “Morning,” I said, doing my best not to focus on their as yet un-tanned breasts. “Morning,” they answered. After they’d rounded a bend behind us, Sloane, sitting in the bow, turned, cocked her eyebrow. “Well? No comment?” She spoke softly as sounds carry over water, and she didn’t want the topless paddlers to hear. “I’d worry about mosquitoes and sunburn,” I said, “but it’s a free world.” Sloane puzzled over my answer for a second. “In the spirit of sisterhood,” she said, and then facing forward, pulled off her sweatshirt and bra. I stared at her back, the way it narrowed near her waist, the
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