The pinprick grows to a small hole about three centimeters in diameter. The noise grows louder, and you can tell from my mom's irritated face that the buzzing bothers her. She holds her clipboard in one hand and her pencil in the other. While the hole "burns" through the fabric-and I'm only guessing that's what I'm witnessing-Mom leans over to get a closer look. Her hair pulls toward the hole, like iron shavings toward a magnet. It is an eerie sight. She notices a strand pull free. Then you can see the collar of her coat lean toward the burn and the papers clipped to her board flap. By now an obvious suction is at work, slight, enough to make my mom step back, but not before the mechanical pencil in her hand flies toward the hole like a hurtling comet and is sucked inside.
My mom jumps back, waves her arms wildly, signaling the techs to shut down the laser. Two people run over to her and the loud machine noise lessens. "Shut it down," my mom yells. Apparently something is wrong. "It is shut off," someone else yells. My mom shakes her head emphatically as the two lab techs drop to the ground and search. I can't hear over the noise what my mom is saying to them, but I'm certain she wants to know if that pencil is anywhere around.
As she leans too close to the small hole in the screen, I see more of her hair pull toward the opening. I gasp at the same time as my mom-as she realizes even with the laser shut down that something anomalous has taken place. I know I've watched too much Star Trek. I can hear Captain Picard say in his British accent, "It's a singular anomaly, no less." Sometimes they called it a "singularity." One of a kind. Something unknown, incongruous, never before seen.
"It's some kind of hole, like a vacuum." Ryan's eyes squint as he puzzles at the sight. "How can that happen? That can't happen, can it?"
I shake my head. "Not that I know of. But you just saw . . ."
I don't know why it takes me so long, but this conclusion hits me harder than witnessing the tear in space. "Ryan, don't you see? That pencil-it's the same one."
I watch the little wheels turn in his brain. He narrows his piercing green eyes at me. "No . . . that's even weirder. Are you saying . . .?" More wheels turn. "That was three days earlier. That means . . ."
He lets out a huge breath and shakes his head in denial. I finish his sentence with a tone of finality. "The pencil moved in time. Backward. My mom created a time rip . . . or something."