Under Shifting Glass Read Online Free Page A

the windowsill, because it is strange and beautiful and I don’t want to lose it again. I don’t want to feel what I felt when I saw that the flask was empty, which is sick and hollow, my stomach clutching just like in the moment when Mom told me Aunt Edie was dead.
    So I move very slowly and quietly, as though the thing is an animal after all and might flee in fear. And it does seem to be vibrating—or trembling, I can’t tell which—as though it is aware of me, watching me, though something without eyes cannot watch.
    â€œIt’s all right,” I find myself saying. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”
    I won’t hurt it! What about it hurting me?
    My room’s not big, as I’ve said, but it takes an age to cross. I am just a hand-stretch away from the pearly, pulsing light when there is a sudden whoosh, like a wind got up from nowhere, and I feel a rush and panic, but I don’t know if it is my rush and panic or that of the thing thatseems to whip and curl past my head and pour itself back into the flask.
    Back into the flask!
    Quick as a flash, I put my thumb over the opening and I hold it down tight as I scrabble in the desk for my sticky tape. I pull at the tape, bite some off, jam it over the open throat of the flask, and then wind it again and again around the neck so the thing cannot escape.
    I have it captured.
    Captured!
    Then I feel like one of those boys you read about in books who pull the wings off flies: violent, cruel. But here’s the question: If you had something in your bedroom that flew and breathed and didn’t obey the laws of science, would you want it at liberty?
    That’s what I thought.

13
    When my heart calms down, I feel I owe the flask (or the thing inside it) an explanation. I think I should tell the truth, about the fear as well as the excitement. But I don’t know who or what I’m dealing with, so I also feel I shouldn’t give too much away. I should be cautious. Si’s always saying that
A man of science proceeds with care
. Or,
If you’re going to mix chemicals, Jess, put your goggles on
.
    I’m not sure what sort of goggles I need to deal with the thing in the flask, but I think the least I can try is an apology.
    â€œI’m sorry about the sticky tape,” I say.
    I’m not really expecting a reply and I don’t get one, but the movement inside the flask does seem to become a little less frantic, so I have the feeling the thing is listening.
    â€œI guess you must have been in that flask a long time,” I say next.
    Where does that remark come from? From the cold and the dust I smelled in the bottle? Or from some storybook knowledge of things in bottles, genies in lamps? What am I imagining, that the thing is some trapped spirit cursed to remain in the flask for a thousand years until—until what? Until Jessica Walton arrives with her father’s ill-fitting slide rule? They say (correction: Si says) if you put a sane person in a lunatic asylum for any length of time they become as mad as the inmates. Me? I’m talking to a thing in a flask.
    I’m calling it
you
.
    The word
you
implies that the thing I’m talking to is alive. I mean, you don’t say
you
to a box of tissues, do you? Or to a hairbrush or a necklace or a cell phone. So I am making a definite assumption about the thing being alive. Mr. Pug, our biology teacher, says that only things that carry out all seven of the life processes can be said to be alive. Pug calls all seven life processes Mrs. Nerg.
    M—for movement
    N—for nutrition
    R—for reproduction
    E—for excretion
    S—for sensitivity
    R—for respiration
    G—for growth
    I look at the thing in the flask. Movement—no doubt about that. Reproduction—I’m not sure I want to think about that right now. Sensitivity—definitely. It’s sensitive to me, I’m sensitive to it. Nutrition—does the thing