The Many Salvations of Rodney Pilchuck

“Rodney, don’t forget to take your lunch, it’s on the first shelf right behind the cottage cheese, and remember to take your umbrella.” Rodney was just about to leave the house when he heard the distinctive, bellowing voice of his mother as it came from her bedroom, passed through the closed door without any substantial loss of energy and reverberated around the small front room, bouncing energetically against the walls almost knocking over the army of crystalline knick-knacks bivouacked over the artificial fireplace.
“All right Mom,” he answered as he ran in almost terror to his 1978 Honda Civic parked on the street. He took neither his lunch, which he hated even more than the cottage cheese it invariably sat behind, nor his umbrella. He knew that despite his mother’s admonitions, she would never remember what she had told him, and that his lunch would be inexorably pushed to the back of the refrigerator where it would meet its end at the hands of the inscrutable mold creatures.
Rodney was heading for work as a CPA for one of the prestigious law firms occupying prime office space in downtown Seattle at the corner of Fourth and University. He just had his seventh anniversary with the firm which happened to be coincident with his thirty-fourth birthday, Sanders, Hillman, Roberts, Kruger and Rayburn were unaware of either of these anniversaries and sometimes confused Rodney with the boy from the deli who delivered sandwiches.
Rodney lived on the Eastside, which in Seattle was shorthand for saying that he was faced with an intolerable commute. The reason for this was obvious to any native, since the Eastside was separated from Seattle by a the huge unyielding and unforgiving Lake Washington, connected by two rather puny bridges. The problem had become so acute that a committee was created by the Seattle City Council to investigate the possibility of emptying the lake and filling it with concrete. It was reasoned that such a project would create thousands of jobs and endless, exhilarating controversy, a bonanza for dozens of talk show hosts who crowded the airways with their dimwitted belligerence.
Unlike other commuters, Rodney looked forward to the occurrence of traffic jams. It quite literally made his day. At first the traffic looked light and moving. This made Rodney uneasy. This would mean he would arrive at work with all his anxieties very much intact and he would have to face yet another day of staggering tedium. Quite suddenly, however, much to Rodney’s glee, the traffic came to a dead halt. “My prayers have been answered, thank you!” he said as he looked down at his hands gripping the steering wheel. He felt that familiar feeling of vertigo and weightlessness overtake him.
“Rodney, I think you should pay attention to your driving,” she said as she eased his hand off of her thigh. “Let’s save the fun for later, besides I can’t even feel your touch with this on.”
It was true, the gleaming suits they were wearing weighed hundreds of earth pounds, and for good reason, it kept them alive as they were moving along the surface of the inhospitable Jovial moon, Io. Rodney and Cynthia Cyborg Allison (the middle name referring to her quasi-biological condition) were mining engineers sent by the EEC ( Extraterrestrial Exploitation Council) to the dismal moon to determine the feasibility of setting up a robot sulfur mining operation on the surface. Periodically, the vehicle would be shaken by volcanoes spewing sulfur into the thin Ionian atmosphere. “Wow, did you see that,” Rodney exclaimed, “wasn’t that breathtaking?”
“Yes,” she answered, barely taking her eyes off of him, “not nearly as breathtaking as you.”
Needless to say, this comment had a predictable effect on Rodney’s anatomy. He suddenly stopped the vehicle, turned towards her and began removing his helmet.
“What are you doing,” she yelled, “don’t do that, you’ll implode.”
“I don’t care,” he said, “I want you!”

Just as the inevitable was about to happen, Rodney was startled by a loud noise. He suddenly recognized the jarring sound of car horns, for the traffic had begun to move while he had remained stationary. On earth once again, Rodney felt wonderfully exhilarated and arrived at work with a remarkable spring in his step. The rest of the day was not only tolerable, but memorable as well.

The End