Milly Strelzoff

Rare Earth

She liked these intellectual men. Wavy shore lines on their heads with a light gray limn like the water just slid back. She saw him in the coffee shop, selling education. He had been showing some high school kids something, down a long shiny copper tube, the kind you don’t find in any retail store. It drew her like a magnet to him, the hot coffee and the physics of it, of him.

Amused, she saw that he was playing with magnets. “Can I see?” she asked, sliding into the chair beside him, her throat a little dry.

“It’s a rare earth magnet. Here,” he said, opening her fingers encircled with red and white beads. He placed a magnet shaped like a yo-yo in her palm. It sang with his warmth.

He closed her fingers down with his. She looked at his hands. They always had lovely long-boned hands, men of science, and frayed jeans with gray threads and tucked-in thin t-shirts, always with some obscure quote. His said, “Newton was down to earth.”

“Hold the tube,” he said, and handed her the copper tube now hot from the students who had held it, bending over the small tippy table. “Hold the tube an inch or so above the table top and drop the magnet.”

She bent over the tube, and peering like an eagle above an aerie she dropped the magnet down the center of the tube. Instead of dropping straight through, the magnet swirled in a spiral, the way feathers sometimes fall, taking their own time, landing softly so as not to hurt.

“Its some sort of eddy current.” He thought he was explaining it to her.

“Can a quarter do it?” she asked.

“Here, try one,” he said, and gave her a quarter.

It clattered gracelessly to the table top.

“You could make a ride,” she said, “and have people fall standing strapped to magnets. That could be a cool Disney ride.”

“Copper is expensive, you know.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe you can try it with something else.”

“It has to be a conductor.” He began to explain as she took to gazing at his hairline, then his long legs ending in loafers. She laughed, watching it swirl through over and over again.

The baristas were washing out the machines when he got up to leave.

“Could you give me a ride?” he asked. He had snagged a ride to and he needed a ride back. He gathered his kit of magnets and tubes and magical-looking wires. She drove him to his apartment and reached across to open the passenger side door for him, letting her fingers linger at the hairs like Velcro along his wrist.

“I feel smart just being around you,” she whispered.

His room was cluttered with clever-looking things, his bed clean and un-slept in. They barely made it to the bed when he took over and she could not stop falling.

She had longed for eternal love, but she loved only warm, snatched hours. If she had met Einstein, the two of them would have cheered for the person discovering relativity. She had to go.

She left early in the morning, while the great smart man slept, but not before she kissed the copper tube all over with her dark lipstick. He would remember her, all right, and whenever he dropped the magnet through the tube, she would feel his kisses dropping between her lips.

Milly Strelzoff is a writer and mother of three children who are a constant source of inspiration. She lives in Hattiesburg. Her personal blog with short stories has been featured on Sulekha.com. She is a computer programmer and an avid reader of all genres of fiction and non-fiction.