The Startle Response
by Edna C. Horning
part 1
The simultaneous crack of lightning and roll of thunder, shocking in volume and suddenness, made Neve and Flint all but jump out of their skins. In the hour preceding, the afternoon storm had been unexceptional, as storms go, with only moderate rain splashing the windows. So Neve and her grandson were taken quite by surprise. Bug-eyed, they looked at each other and then laughed.
“Do you know what we just did?” Neve asked Flint. He shook his head.
“It’s called the startle response, something we do unintentionally, spontaneously, involuntarily. We can’t help jerking, whether we want to or not, because it grabs us and won’t let us go, at least for a second or two. It makes us pay attention.”
“How come?”
“It has a lot to do with survival. You’ll learn more in biology class when you study evolution,” she replied, opportunistically plugging her undergraduate major. “We’re alive, and we want to go on being alive, and that goes for people we love as well. If something very unexpected happens, it could be harmful, and the startle response warns us.”
Flint, who was settled on the floor, looked up from his project and asked, “But what makes thunder and lightning in the first place?”
Neve mined her brain for residue correct and age-appropriate. But then eight-year old Francis, aptly nicknamed Flint because he entered kindergarten having already taught himself to read from road signs and food labels, was currently mastering the Smart Brain Junior Solar Workshop for Kids; so most likely his comprehension wouldn’t be a problem. Her accuracy was more likely the issue.
Neve inhaled. “When lightning strikes—”
“Electricity!” Flint interjected, pleased with himself.
“Right!” Neve responded. “When lightning strikes the air, it creates a vacuum.”
Here she paused to give Flint an opportunity for additional displays of knowledge. But he kept his questioning eyes fixed on her, and she continued.
“A vacuum is a void, a place where nothing is, and in storms it means that lightning has, well, sort of poked a hole in the sky, funny as that might sound. And nature abhors a vacuum, or so I was taught in school, and the air that got kicked out by the lightning comes rushing back to fill the hole, and all that rushing creates the noise we call thunder.”
Flint’s face lit up. “It splits the sky!” he exclaimed, struck by the imagery. “No wonder it’s so loud,” he said. “It’s funny, but my brain is like that sometimes, sort of,” he said, all seriousness, his brow once again furrowed.
“Like what?”
“My brain can be thinking one thing and suddenly, boom, that idea gets kicked out, and a totally different idea pushes in, whether I want it to or not. Like the sky, it gets split, too.” And then, ostensibly as satisfied with his own explanation as he had been with hers, he returned to his Smart Brain Junior Solar Workshop.
Neve smiled at Flint’s metaphor and then, changed the subject. “Tell me, Sweetheart, do you like school better than you used to? I ask because I remember you expressed displeasure with certain aspects.”
He shrugged. “I was really, really bored at first, but it’s okay now. Yeah, I like it fine. Unless I’m hungry, and then I concentrate real hard to make the hands on the clock move faster so I can go to lunch.”
“And does that work? Are you able to move the clock’s hands just by thinking?”
“Well, sure,” he replied, astonished at her naïveté. “It works every time. Thoughts are the most powerfullest things of all,” he assured with greater fervor than grammar. He spread his hands apart. “They can move stuff.”
Neve momentarily considered gently correcting this childish fantasy but voted it down. She was reminded of her own youthful episodes of wishful, magical thinking and how the relentless passage of time with its cold, brutal facts had slowly ground them to mush.
During her junior and senior high school years, she had prayed, among other things, for her algebra teacher to give her an A (she didn’t), for Ethan Gerson to ask her to the prom (he hadn’t), and for her grandfather to be cured of cancer (he wasn’t).
During her college career, she had inhaled the mournful breath of Existentialist-leaning professors who shaped and solidified the final product and openly sneered at weaklings who caved to what they deemed the “bad faith” of finding value, meaning and purpose in an indifferent cosmos deaf to our cries. Neve came away believing in nothing higher than the eagles and their craggy mountain perches, and the conviction had not slackened since.
No doubt the same disillusion would follow soon enough for her grandson, so why hurry it. Shades of the prison house...
* * *
Neve finished clearing the breakfast things and looked at her watch: nine-thirty. So, seven-thirty in California. They should be wheeling Clo into the operating room right about now, she thought and peered briefly out the window.
Clo was Neve’s sister-in-law, the wife of her ten-years younger brother Mason and, from her birth till the present moment, she had been the child, sibling, spouse, parent, in-law, friend, neighbor, or work colleague that anyone in possession of a normal perspective hopes to win in life’s lottery. Her intelligence, generosity, sense of humor, and level head for whatever life lobbed her way approached the legendary, and Neve had come to realize she liked Clo considerably better than many of her own blood relatives, a feeling accompanied by a degree of guilt about which she could do little.
There was the time that Clo, a registered nurse, had just come on duty and, upon making her assigned rounds, discovered that an elderly woman, confused and disoriented from residual anesthesia in addition to early dementia, had crawled out a fourth-story window and was seated on a ledge no more than thirty inches wide, her bare, unshaven legs dangling over the side.
Waiting for neither help nor permission, Clo had removed her stockings and crepe-soled shoes and climbed out the same window, scooting her backside along the ledge until she was next to the woman. In a calm, reassuring voice, she persuaded her to return to the building in similar fashion, all the while holding her hand. Once both were safely inside and the woman was examined and relocated to a more supervised area, Clo had matter-of-factly finished her scheduled duties three-quarters of an hour late.
Then there was the time Scratch, her daughter Lucinda’s Siamese, had bolted from the car window in a strange part of town and had disappeared into a small wood that mother and daughter scoured high and low for hours without success. The next day, with a weeping, distraught child in tow, Clo returned to the area with an audio recording of the electric can opener used every evening for the cat’s dinner. She held a borrowed, battery-powered megaphone next to the player, and before ten minutes passed Scratch came sauntering from among the trees as shameless and unapologetic as ever but, presumably, hungry.
And yet again was the neighbor who had come banging on Clo’s door one weekend morning howling like a banshee. While the child’s mother was shopping and the father had been — to pardon the expression — watching their son, the boy had swallowed a bowlful of roofing nails left on the table. Clo had held him upside down and pounded her fist between his shoulders until he vomited every single one.
Once the danger was past, the shaking, ashen-faced man had implored her not to tell his wife what had transpired in her absence. Clo had examined her conscience on the spot and decided maybe the experience had been sufficiently harrowing that he would never again be so careless and so chose not to rat him out. That time.
“But from then on,” Clo had confided, “whenever we were outside at the same time, I could see the poor man blanch from clear across the street.”
And when Clo and Mason’s youngest child had had his reading progress assessed as “below grade level” at the end of his first year of school, she had temporarily switched from full- to part-time to tutor him herself, and by summer’s end he was above grade level, those curious black marks on white backgrounds having been demystified once and for all. To compensate for the income loss, she had sold a valuable family heirloom to a local antiques dealer who had been after it for years.
Clo and Mason had met years ago when the two strangers, college students on break, were assigned seats next to each other on a four-hour flight from St. Louis to Oakland. Mason was hoping to get the pretty brunette’s number and kept mentally rehearsing and rejecting possible ways to accomplish this.
Finally, he was rescued, in a manner of speaking, from his dilemma by a random but ultimately favorable development. Returning to his seat after a trip to the rear of the plane, he leaned slightly closer and confided, “Call me crazy, but I think someone’s been smoking weed in the lavatory. I could smell it.”
Clo had fleetingly looked in that direction, blinked once or twice, and then quipped, “Well, that’s plain wrong, of course. Only one trip per fare.”
Her delivery had been utterly deadpan, but a new twinkle in her russet eyes boosted his hope. Mason appreciatively chuckled and, aspiring to match her wit, tipped his Chivas and soda towards her and said, “I don’t smoke pot myself. I just get drunk like the good Lord intends me to.”
Clo had responded with a hearty, delighted giggle that turned the heads of nearby travelers, and by the time the plane landed, she had scrawled her number on the cocktail napkin of handy, historic fame.
Yep, Clothilde Marguerite Thomsett was a one-woman band who could change a flat, lead the singing, or stare down a sadistic surgeon with equal aplomb. And her Dutch fudge cake layered with hazelnut filling and topped with white chocolate frosting had been known to make grown men cry and lose all their ambition.
The lone holdout from her fan club was, perhaps, Burma, who had once sniffingly referred to Clo as a “show-off.” Neve had almost called her out but thought better of it. No good stirring the stew at a family reunion and, coincidentally, revealing that she had been eavesdropping on a conversation not meant for her ears. And anyway, everyone knew Burma had gone sour after her husband dumped her for an aspiring model — and, as later disclosed, former pole dancer — he met in an airport VIP lounge.
Neve was not particularly worried about Clo’s surgery, nor, as far as she knew, were the rest of the family. It was a routine hysterectomy, with no complications anticipated. As a nurse par excellence, Clo always knew which doctors were best for herself, her kith and kin, and anyone else who needed one. It ran in the family. One of her uncles had been Arnold Palmer’s rheumatologist.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Edna C. Horning
