Ficlets

Going Home

Henry sat in front of his gate at Logan Airport, hoping that his earlier semester work would overcome his performance this last week. The need to undo the conundrum of the Pulse had overtaken the need to derive polynomials.

On the plane, Henry went over what he knew. The Pulse cycled over eight days, six hours and twenty four minutes. This meant that the next iteration of the Pulse would begin just before Christmas. If he could predict that, then maybe he could record it, and that would be the first step to analysis.

But the Pulse wasn’t sound. He couldn’t just tape it. It wasn’t light. A camera wouldn’t work. The Pulse was some other kind of vibrational energy. Henry considered trying a seismograph, but ruled it out because even if the machine could detect the pulse, San Francisco’s natural seismic activity would most probably obscure it.

Henry’s plane landed and he collected his things. On the way home, he stopped at a music shop and bought a composition book. He would record the Pulse manually…

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