Noise - By Darin Bradley Page 0,3

write my term paper about the dangers of the portable router.

We had to learn first aid in shop class, too. Which was fine because I was already learning it in the Boy Scouts.

The noise was a thing. The theft and the running and bolting it to the counter had been things, too. They were terminal punctuation. They were our commitment to our Plan, because these things were the last steps we could take. The final preparations. Everything else was reversible—wouldn’t get us in trouble if Salvage turned out wrong. If everything quieted down, and we got jobs and suits and broke our promises to each other to live in the same town—to have wives who were friends and kids who asked us to teach them how to play Dungeons & Dragons.

But what we’d done—breaking into Meyer’s, leaving footprints, ruining the landlord’s counter—these were things we couldn’t take back. We had to wait until we were sure. We knew from the goateed guys at the Faire’s armory that sharpening carbon-steel swords on a bench grinder would ruin the machine. It created harmonics that had nowhere to go but back into the machine’s bearings. And they would burn up, lock the wheels, and destroy the motor. And we knew that sharp edges were just ideas, that they fade over time, so that sharpening our swords too soon, while we were still practicing swordplay, would only mean we’d have to do it over again. That would mean two grinders, which we couldn’t afford, and didn’t want to steal. It would mean having mounted the grinder a lot sooner, when we still worried about the landlord coming around. It was impossible. If he came now, we didn’t care. We were ready.

We put soft edges on the swords, which were looser ideas about sharpness than what we intended. Than what we intended to do with these edges.

We took turns, grinding and grinding, throwing sparks onto the linoleum and against the fridge. The other of us paced from window to window, watching for notice. We had every light in the house on to make it look like we were working our late-night house-flipping renovation. They dimmed, a sort of sinking light-choir, every time one of us bore down on the wheels with our steel.

We only made them so sharp. Because we had to practice, which was going to dull them. After we’d practiced, then we’d finish the ideas. We’d sharpen them fully. And we got lucky—the grinder didn’t burn up, because we didn’t finish the job. We let it cool, and added some lubricant, which would be enough, we’d heard, to finish the job.

There would come days, though, when we would do this by hand. With our whetstones.

• • •

What I remember most about pumpkins isn’t carving them. It’s the smell. Even fresh pumpkins smelled like rot to me, like bad flesh, and disemboweling them so you could insert candles felt like grabbing fistfuls of decayed sinew—the seeds like tumors caught in their own body-webbing. Roasting the seeds, with salt and oil, always seemed carnivorous, even though we were dealing with a plant.

We had the pumpkins set up on sawhorsed plywood, on the dark side of the house, where neither Jo nor our other neighbor could see what we were doing. We were screened from the next property by the backyard’s mess of bamboo and sycamore trees.

Outside, in the dark, I held my sword like a carving knife. I thought about Halloweens past, about how we created glowing faces with sharp knives. How pumpkins became jack-o’-lanterns. About what I wanted faces to look like. About what I had to do to a pumpkin to get what I needed to know about striking someone in the head with a sword.

It took practice, slicing into the pumpkins instead of simply knocking them from the plywood.

We also used watermelons, which were important because they made “the sound.”

Later, we finished the idea. We finished the edges and burned up the grinder. Adam put all the pumpkin seeds we’d picked from the plywood on a baking sheet. Added salt and oil, because there was no sense wasting. Not with what was coming. We had to become accustomed to doing carnivorous things.

• • •

Killing people outside a grocery store is more than it seems. It is also collecting baseball cards.

It is an entire pack, a box of packs, too large to steal. You must simply take them, right in front of the assistant manager who only let six students in at a