The Window Blind
by
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Dimension 10-71
Beck laid out two beach towels, smoothing them over the tease of the wind. Reaching into a brown paper bag, he removed two take-out containers, one of penne arrabbiata, the other of linguini and clams. He would wait to light the candles, if the wind permitted. As he sat in the sand, he heard the cut of the engine and her familiar staccato footsteps on the pavement. He twisted his mala with nervous anticipation.
She walked towards him in jeans, a yellow zip-up jacket and green mules. Shugga was under her arm, and as she reached the sand, she kicked off her shoes. He wolf-whistled, and she smiled her shy smile.
“Hey,” she said, settling Shugga on the sand.
“Hey, Beautiful.”
“And what’s all this?”
“Dinner. You like penne arrabbiata and linguini with clams?”
“Most definitely. Really draw out the ‘n’ in penne, though.”
“Pennne?”
“Well, close enough. Otherwise, in Italian ‘pene’ means something else.”
“What’s that?”
She giggled and blushed. “Penis.”
“And arrabbiata?”
“Hot, angry.”
“Nope. Uh-Uh. No hot, angry penis here.” He smiled, patting the sand. “Panna water?”
“Lovely,” she whispered, sitting across from him.
“You want to light the candles, Caterina?”
“If the wind allows. Candles in the wind…” she sang. She snapped her lighter and leaned over two candles nestled in burgundy-colored glasses. The flame flickered and her face was painted magenta.
He served her a paper plate laden with bread and the penne.
“No linguini for me?”
“It tastes better like this,” he said, offering a forkful of tangled noodles to her lips.
“Yummy.” She blushed again and looked away, offering a piece of bread to Shugga. “Dinner is lovely, but what’s for afters?”
“Afters?”
“Dessert.”
“I spent my money on the dinner. So dessert would be fortune cookies. I found them in the house from the last time someone had Chinese. Hopefully, they’re not too stale, but most people want the fortune cookie just for the fortune.”
“Fortune cookies? Now that’s-a Italian.”
“Well Columbus got pasta from the Orient.”
“An Orby is better, but fortunes are nice because you get a cookie too, even if they’re like cardboard.”
“Orby? What’s an Orby?”
“It’s personal kindness that becomes random.”
Beck twirled linguini around his fork and stabbed a runaway clam. “Personal kindness that becomes random,” he repeated. “Isn’t it usually the other way around? Like with us, Caterina. We were randomly kind to each other, but it became personal and then we became friends.”
She held a piece of bread to Beck’s lips. He opened his mouth and she placed it on his tongue.
“With an Orby, you give someone a message in a container, like a little plastic egg, and then they give someone else a message in the same egg, but they include yours, and on and on. So what begins as personal stays personal, but it also becomes random because eventually the receiver doesn’t know which message was meant for him individually. But it also can be all personal, because since you don’t know which one is yours, they can all become yours. I’ll give you one sometime.”
“I’d welcome your Orby. I’d love to see your message to me. I’d probably cheat though.” He pressed another forkful of pasta between her lips. “I wouldn’t pass it on. Maybe I’d photocopy it, but I wouldn’t give it away. Not the original.”
“Can I see mine now? My fortune?”
He handed her a cookie. She split it in half, popping a piece in her mouth as she eagerly read the fortune. “Huh-yeah? Right,” Caterina scoffed. “That’s the kind of fortune I would get.”
“What’s it say?” Beck asked, his mouth full.
“’Recycling plays a large role in your life.’” She laughed her husky belly laugh. “Who the heck gets a fortune like that? Me. God, where’s the lottery? Man of my dreams?”
Beck rolled his cookie along his palm.
“Let’s read yours,” she said conspiratorially with a come-hither wink.
Beck broke off a small piece at one upturned corner of his cookie and removed the fortune. He scanned it, nodding approvingly.
“What’s it say, what’s it say?” she asked girlishly.
Beck dangled the paper before his lips.
“Beck! That’s not fair. No fair. I told you mine.”
He smiled at her and sucked the string of fortune into his mouth.
“Beck!” she laughed, leaning over him. “That wasn’t the bargain.” She raised her hand to his lips and forced one finger in his mouth.
She smiled and her teeth shone in the moonlight. He kissed her, and to his surprise, she kissed him back. His tongue rolled around her mouth and sucked on her upper lip. She wasn’t a bite of ice cream, she was a sundae royale, with cool lips, a warm tongue, and a sweet wetness like strawberry syrup. He gently bit into her cherry-centered bottom lip and he felt her tongue rub his chipped tooth.
She turned her head and spat into the sand. “Beck? I’ve got paper in my mouth!” She grasped the strip of paper, limp as a wet noodle, and held it to the candle. “I can’t read this. What did it say, Beck?”
Her hair whipped like a ragged flag in the wind, the ends reaching for the sky. He slipped off his mala bracelet and banded her hair, then sat behind her, straddling his legs around hers. Her ear was a cold shell against his breath. “It said, ‘Recycle me, Caterina. Make me into something else.’”
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About the Book
Caterina Cammino is an attractive and reclusive thirty-five-year-old woman whose nightly ritual is to go to the beach and drink wine from the bar of her car. Though alcohol is her crutch and companion, it can’t erase the memory of the summer of 1988 when she lost her innocence--and awoke to a scream.
Tyler Beck is an intellectually gifted eighteen-year-old loner who has an invisible, magical cord above his right shoulder; he is also a former drug addict who was rehabilitated with the help of a counselor named Robie. After Robie dies, however, a distraught Beck exits his friend’s funeral and seeks refuge at the beach—and in heroin.
Their lives collide when Caterina’s car strikes a trashcan that crashes into the semi-conscious Beck. When they both ask aloud for help, the grieving parts of themselves are transported to another dimension called 10-17. Caterina arrives in this dimension as her seventeen-year-old self, Cat, and there she meets Beck, whom she nicknames Ty. Once in this new world, set against a backdrop of Italy, they meet a Watcher named Miranda who tells them that they are in 10-17 for healing, even while their parallel lives are continuing on Earth. Miranda explains that the dimensions are spaced like slats on a window blind; she also tells the teenagers about a place called Thare, an Earth-like dimension populated by humans, but without suffering or addiction.
While Beck readily embraces his love for the mature Caterina, she is conflicted over her feelings for a man half her age. Meanwhile, in Dimension 10-17, as Cat and Ty complete their lesson, they are torn over the choice that Miranda offers them: To go to the “perfect” world of Thare and leave the Earth and their families behind, or to return wholly to their Earthly selves...
About the Author
Patricia Colton says of her book The Window Blind: “It’s about an imperfect world called Earth, a perfect world called Thare—and a love unbounded by any world. But that’s just the summary; like real life, what matters is the story that happens in between. As a writer it was rewarding to not only create these characters, but to stowaway on their journey with them.” A UCLA graduate, Ms. Colton is a writer and graduate student living in Santa Monica, CA. The Window Blind is her first novel.