By Ben Greenman
from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled
An engineer and technologist, Odion Bello, this week succeeded in extracting new letters from the atmosphere by means of a device he has invented. Bello, a native of Benin, has been a resident of town for twelve years now, since his marriage to the former Clara Bedfield, the principal of Cypress Middle School, and he carried out his experiments atop a large plexiglas cube in his family’s backyard as his ten-year-old twins, Isoke and Ode, looked on. Bello sat upon a rotating stool in the center of the cube’s top face, wearing protective gloves, and antenna were mounted in pairs on the lawn exactly ten meters from each of the cube’s lateral faces. Electricity at a strength of 6,000 volts was received by the antenna and transferred to the cube by underground wires, at which point it was transformed to a safe voltage that resulted in the appearance of symbols on the surface of the cube in a circle around the stool—and by extension around Bello. Isoke and Ode, who could see the letters (albeit backwards) began to call out names for them: “Deta,” “Des,” “Rance,” “Fift.” Bello them carefully peeled off the symbols and began to assemble them into a previously unknown alphabet.
No comments:
Post a Comment