The Inertiad

by Tim Horvath

1
We’re watching the film being projected onto the face of the moon. And in that way, we’re like everyone else, right? We get out our binoculars, our telescopes, and we join the human throng now gathering on every hill and promontory. Some balconies, some rooftops. Don’t be the guy who tried to displace an osprey family, got mauled. What will it be, the first film projected onto the face of the moon? Will it be a romantic comedy, or is that too obvious? Maybe something involving werewolves. Or like Hitchcock only with osprey. There are rumors, of course, that it is actually an international plot to blind millions. These conspiracy theories have been bandied about on secret discussion boards for months, spurred by the rants of the mystery poster who goes by “Galileo.” Then there are others who think it will be some blockbuster, debuting there, one that will avail itself of the properties of the moon, of moonness, that woozy glow no screen can quite duplicate. As we train our gazes upward—are those credits or craters?—we are reminded of those whimsical postcards that show audiences watching 3D movies, glued in rows in their pasty white glasses like they’re at some masquerade ball. Threedimensional beings aching for an extra dimension, like a partner they’ll dance one dance with and whose name they will forget to ask for and who will be gone by the time they think to do so.

2
All onions are angry, but some onions are rage onions, and the one I’m cooking tonight is one. It sputters and spats and holds back nothing, I tell you, nothing. What is the origin of its fulminations, its vulcanology? Perhaps it is all those layers and nothing beneath them. Years of therapy only reveal more of the same, more of the same, all the way down. By the time there is insight, there is nothing left to have the insight. Or maybe it is just that nearly everyone loves onions, but no one would call the onion their favorite food. No one in the long or short depending on how you look at it history of the world. 

3
The It Is What It Is Crew can be here between 2 and 5 on Tuesday. What a relief—it was getting to be agony. What they do: they come and suss out the situation, whatever it might be—pilot light blown out, constipated sump pump, marriage gone Havisham even as its members are out there ziplining their way through school board meetings and Zumba classes and Fantasy Football leagues. They look everything over, Kilroyed by clipboards, make marks with their corporate-logoed pencils; they sift the situation, turn it over lip-twitchily, and eventually, usually within the hour, determine whether it is in fact what it is, a verdict delivered with such indisputable authority and steamroll thrust that all you can do is nod, offer each a seltzer for the road, and revert to the flotation tank of days, the only unrising ocean you can find.

Tim Horvath (timhorvath.com) is the author of Understories (Bellevue Literary Press), which won the New Hampshire Literary Award, and has stories in Conjunctions, AGNI, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Best Small Fictions 2021, and elsewhere. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy and in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook. He is currently working on a novel and a follow-up story collection.