Porter

5

             
Porter
             

Porter

By

Laurence E Dahners

She was at
her cousin Mindy’s
birthday
party
.
It was a hot summer day and
Aunt Stella
hotfooted it
across the
burning
pool deck
to hand Allie and Mindy each a glass
of icy Kool-Aid. In the humidity, the glass was sweating nearly as much as Allie
was
and she
bowed her strawberry blonde head over
it
in puzzlement
. “How does the water get to the outside of the glass?”

With a puzzled tone h
er aunt
posited
,
“Maybe t
he heat make
s
the glass leaky.”

“For God’s sake Stella!” Allie’s dad said without opening his eyes behind his sunglasses. “It’s condensation! The cold condenses water on
to
the glass!”  He laid his head back against the
deck recliner
and adjusted the brim of his hat
to cover his eyes again
.

Not knowing what “condensation” was,
Allie thought to herself that
her dad’s
explanation
wasn’t
at all
helpful
,
big word
s
but
a complete
lack of
enlightenment
. She didn’t want to ask her dad
about it
and
thereby
get a long and
complicated
elucidation
though
.
Everybody
thought
her Dad was a genius
,
but
he had a tendency to explain things in such detail that they became even more confusing
than they were
to begin with
.

Still thinking about it, s
he
squinted and
pictured a tiny
tunnel
through the glass, from the Kool-Aid
on the
inside to
the air on
the outer surface.
As she visualized
it, to her astonishment a big drop welled up
on the surface of the glass, right
where she was
imagining
the hole
!
During
her
moment of startlement
,
the drop
stopped
growing
, but it
then resumed
growing
and began
dribbl
ing when she concentrated
on it
again
. E
ventually
it became
a steady stream.
After a moment, the
level of Kool-Aid in the glass fell to the level of Allie’s “hole” and the
stream
slowed down and stopped.
Allie picked up the glass and tasted the dribble. Yep, Kool-Aid. She tasted the
other
tiny drops
covering
the rest of the glass – they were
just
water.

Allie took a sip and looked over at Mindy. Mindy was raising her glass to her lips. Allie focused on Mindy’s glass and was rewarded with a dribble down Mindy’s chin. “Ew!” Mindy set the glass down and wiped her chin
, staring
suspiciously
at the rim of the glass and running her finger
over it.
She wiped sticky fingers on the table top with distaste.
Then she brightened, “Let’s get in the pool!
”

The next night, when the Dans
family
sat down to dinner,
Allie looked at the condensation on the surface of
a
glass
the
iced tea her mom had
just
served
. Remembering, s
he held the glass up over her plate and pictured a tunnel through the bottom of the glass – sure enough the bottom of the glass
began to drip
onto her plate when she formed the port.

She looked over at her dad. He had brought a paper to the dinner table and was studying it.
His reading at the dinner table
always made Mom mad
,
but he did it a lot anyway
.
He lifted his glass. Allie made a port just behind the lip and giggled as she saw tea run down his chin. “What the hell?!” he swore
,
setting the glass down and reaching for a napkin. He looked suspiciously over at Allie who was desperately trying to stifle
a
giggle. Then he examined the glass
. It
was one of their regular glasses. It
didn’t have a convoluted surface like dribble glasses
have. In fact, it had a perfectly smooth, one could say “glassy
,
” surface. “What the hell?!” he
repeated and looked at Allie again. “Did you do that somehow?”

With her hand over her mouth, Allie giggled a little more while nodding her head.

He looked back at the glass, running a finger over its surface below the rim, both inside and outside. Puzzled,
he asked,
“How?”

“I just made a leak like Aunt Stella said.”

“What?”

“Well, she said ‘the heat makes
the glass leaky.’
You
said it was ‘condensation’
I
made a little tunnel through the glass ‘cause I don’t know how to make it
‘
leaky
’
.”

“What?”

“She said ‘the heat made-’”

“I
know
what she said! It was stupid! Heat doesn’t make glass leaky!”

Allie bowed her head, “Sorry.” Her dad
was
mostly pretty nice but he could be
a little
scary when he was mad.

“No,
how
did
you
make the glass leak?”

In a small voice, “I made a little tunnel
...”

“There isn’t a tunnel there!”

A smaller voice, “
Only
when I think it.”

Goosebumps raised the hair on Albert Dans
’
neck. “What?”

Allie w
hispered, “Only when I think it.”

He was holding the glass in the air and to his astonishment a small stream of tea appeared just below the glass and splattered on his plate. It wasn’t coming from the glass, or through the glass, it was appearing in space about an inch below the
bottom of the
glass then streaming straight down!
He
dropped the glass, leaping to his feet and
knocking
his chair over backwards, “Holy shit!”
The glass shattered on his dinner plate, breaking it also.

With a small cry Allie ducked her head and
bolted from the table, running upstairs
to her room.

Allie’s
m
om looked away from Stephen, Allie’s
towheaded
4 year old brother. “What just happened?”

Al set the chair back up
, shook his head
and said, “I have no idea.” He
got
a broom and mop
, cleaned up the mess
,
then
dished himself another plate. He
took his plate and Allie’s up to her room.

Allie had curled up on the bed and when he entered, she looked apprehensively
up through her hair
at her dad. “You’re not in trouble; I brought you your dinner.” Al sat down on the corner of her bed, putting her plate on her desk.

Allie pulled her hair
partly
back off her face to peer more clearly at her dad, who indeed did not seem angry. “I’m not hungry.”

“OK.” Her dad calmly began eating his own dinner. “Do you think you could show me what you can do with your ‘tunnels’ later?”

“OK.” Allie got off the bed, wiped her nose and went over to sit at her desk. She picked at her food for a while but didn’t eat much.

“Are you done?” Her dad asked, nodding at her plate.

“Yes.” She said in a small voice.

He picked up both of their plates and took them down to put in the dishwasher. Shortly, he appeared back in her door with two bowls of ice cream.
She
raised
her
eyebrows. “But I didn’t eat all my dinner?”

“I know. Some rules are made to be broken.”

They ate their ice cream in silence. When it was gone he asked, “Ready to make me a
‘
tunnel
’
?” Allie nodded, rubbing her wrist under her nose again. He heard a spraying sound and looked down in astonishment at a tiny jet of water shooting into the bottom of his ice cream bowl. “What the hell!?” He looked back up at Allie who was watching the spray too. He swallowed, “Where is
that
tunnel coming from?”

“The pipe in the wall there.” She pointed over his shoulder with her chin. The spray stopped.

“How did you know there was a pipe in the wall?”

“I sorta feel them… Don’t you?”

Her dad made a choking sound, “No
..
.
I don’t think anybody can
…
e
xcept
maybe
you.
”
He began
asking a seemingly endless list of questions, most of which she couldn’t answer. She dribbled water out of glasses and sprayed it out of pipes. After a while
she developed
a headache and
became unable
to
create more than a tiny tunnel. S
till he wanted her to do more.

Finally her mother came in and watched what was going on
with
growing
astonishment. After a while though she said,
“Al, she needs to rest. It’s past her bedtime.”

He turned to snap at
his wife
, then looked back at Allie
,
all droopy around the edges. “OK
Sarah
. Allie, we’ll go into my lab tomorrow and learn more about what you can do.”

Allie sighed and
put on her pajamas
. She wasn’t looking forward to it.
Tomorrow, s
he and Mindy
had been going to hang out at
the pool.
Her head was throbbing. Her mom got her a Tylenol and she curled up
to sleep
with
Oscar
,
her cat.

Her dad spent hours on the internet trying to find credible evidence of teleportation or whatever the hell this phenomenon was.
Not even a “less than credible” report of the same phenomenon was to be found.

             
The next morning
Allie’s
dad got her up early to
take her
in to his lab
in the physics department
at the University. He ignored her protests about going swimming with Mindy. When her mother said something about it, he just told her to let
Aunt
Stella know that Allie was “busy.”
At the lab, t
hey did measurements until Allie’s head was splitting
again. H
er e
yes would hardly stay open. They
rested over lunch
at Burger King
and
started over.
Dr. Dans
’
m
agnetic and electrical f
ield measurements around Allie
showed nothing
different from those about his own head
.
Measurements around the ports found oddly “swirling” fields.
Samples of distilled water and some organic solvents that had been through ports were put aside for assay by a frie
nd in the chemistry department who
later
told them there were
no changes from
the
control specimens that hadn’t been “ported.”
Bacteria and yeast that had been ported continued to live.
When Allie
got too tired to
make ports
again
her dad spent time on the phone with a friend at the medical school trying to arrange an
MRI
of her head “to see if there were any unusual structures.”