Some Words Are Messengers

 

“Did you hear about the new probe that’s just been launched toward Mercury?” I asked Ms. Messenger as I massaged the back of her thigh.

“No, I haven’t. I do usually follow news about space exploration, but I hadn’t heard about it. Who has launched it?”

“It was NASA. I thought you’d be interested, in particular, since its name is MESSENGER.”

“Hah. Well, that’s appropriate, for going to Mercury.”

“Just so. It’s an acronym, describing the kinds of instruments it’s going to be carrying, the things it’s going to be looking for. I forget what-all it’s doing. I believe one thing it will be doing is looking for ice.”

“Ice? Really?”

“Well, at the poles, in deep craters, there are shadowed places where the Sun never shines, so the temperature remains extremely low. Almost as cold as people imagined the back side of Mercury would be, when we thought it was tidally locked and always kept one face toward the Sun.”

I folded the sheet back over her leg and moved around to the head to fold it down to uncover her back. I tucked it into the waistband of her underpants to make sure they were protected and spread oil across her back.

“People thought that? I never heard that.”

“Yes, until the 1960s. The way the Moon is tidally locked to the Sun.”

“Whoa. If that happened, then the night side would never see the Sun at all…it would be so cold…whoa.”

“Yes. Colder than Pluto, which at least gets a tiny bit of Sunlight. It would be the coldest place in the Solar System.”

“Spooky.”

“I’d been meaning to ask you about your name. Do you know where it comes from?”

“I don’t. I only know my ancestry back about four generations, all in this country. I’ve been married twice, and kept it both times, because I couldn’t give it up.”

“Hey, if I married a woman named Messenger, I’d take her name.”

“Good for you.”

“Did you ever see that movie, The List of Adrian Messenger?”

“No, heard of it. That’s the one where a bunch of people turn out at the end to have been wearing heavy makeup to disguise themselves?”

“Yes. A weird gimmick. They didn’t quite have the technology to pull it off back then, you could pretty easily tell who the actors were, most of the time, but it was a fun movie anyway. One of those grisly murder comedies where a large number of people are killed in grotesque ways.”

“People are weird sometimes.”

I went on rubbing down her back.

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91108/words-are-birds