9/10/12

Hoover Dam
By Eric Suhem


Neda worked in a gift shop at the edge of the Hoover Dam. She would sell small dam trinkets and replicas to enthusiastic tourists, while staring at a map of the surrounding Mojave Desert. Neda’s beloved, a pioneering biologist named Dane, was part of an exploratory team researching Gila monster eggs in the desert. But the research team had mysteriously disappeared, and Neda’s tears for her missing beloved fell upon the postcards of the Hoover Dam in the gift shop, smearing the images of sky and cement. Most tourists would not buy the postcards in that condition, though some art-inclined visitors felt that the tears added a new dimension to the otherwise humdrum depiction of the Depression-era water-damming edifice, paying extra dollars and cents for a postcard stained by the fluid of Neda’s tear ducts.

One morning, Neda committed a transgression in the gift shop, slapping a decal of the Hoover Dam to the forehead of a 4-year old hellion named Edna, who was running amuck in the shop, knocking trinkets off the shelves, tearing up lovingly rendered reprint images of the dam. The child turned out to have influential parents, and Neda was fired later that morning. Little Edna would soon enjoy a lunch of toast and herbal tea, but Neda would not have as pleasant a meal, munching on difficult wafers, blood and regrets.

That night, feeling lost without Dane, Neda decided to walk along the length of the Hoover Dam, holding a metal fork in the air, in the midst of a lightning storm, waiting for a shock from above. Neda received the jolt 2.8 minutes into the walk, being struck down by the fatal jagged bolt of light, spasmodically clutching the kitchen fork as the volts worked their way through her skeleton and membrane. After her death, the local legend was that Neda’s spirit still trolled the desert in a 1934 Studebaker, pining for her lost love Dane.

Two decades later, the child from the gift shop, Edna, now grown up, had a baby in Kingman, AZ. The baby had a strange rectangular birthmark on her head. During her pregnancy, Edna had been feeling a strong pull toward the Hoover Dam. She had seen it in the kitchen sink, as part of the water’s reflection, and then an image of the dam was mysteriously mowed into her lawn, a sort of small-scale suburban ‘crop circle’.

One night as the storm clouds gathered over the desert, Edna could no longer resist the pull. She packed the baby into her 1954 Studebaker, and drove along the highway toward the Hoover Dam. As she neared the dam, Edna saw a broken down car by the side of the road, with Gila monster eggs near its right front tire. Alone in the car was an infant, apparently abandoned. Edna pulled to the side of the road to rescue the deserted child, placing him next to her baby in the back seat. In Edna’s Studebaker, the two infants locked eyes as lightning struck in the desert. Flashing recognition and love, the wandering souls of Neda and Dane rediscovered each other.

Edna drove to the local authorities, and after weeks of investigation and paperwork, was able to adopt the baby she had found in the abandoned car. The two infants were inseparable, as they grew together into childhood, then adulthood. As the years went by, they pooled together enough money to buy the Hoover Dam gift shop, which they would run together throughout eternity.


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Eric Suhem dwells in office cubicles and ocean waves. His new book "Dark Vegetables" can be found in the orange hallway (www.orangehallway.com)