FICTION Total Omniscience Fred Waage Russell had a hard time getting his granddaddy out of the car. He was very impatient-as he heaved and hauled, and his granddaddy grunted-because he wanted to get back to the shop and make up with Lorraine. He didn't know Lorraine was thinking it was good Russell wasn 't hanging around, so she'd have peace and quiet to decide ifshe really wanted to keep going with him or not. She was getting sick ofhis abrupt sexual technique. Rusty, the high school tennis star who worked in the shop on weekends, was staring at Lorraine, wishing she was younger and that he was working at the Mall, where there were a lot more girls with higher and bigger tits. Rusty didn't like television anyway. He'd rather close his eyes, listen to grunge, and dream about Lara, the older (by two minutes) twin daughter ofDr. Ashkidian, whose wife Marge was still living in the pine-knot condo next to the lot where Russell was hauling his granddaddy out of the car, where they'd lived ever since Dr. Ashkidian himselfhad been accused ofmolesting one ofhis dental patients, a sixtyyear old farmer's wife named Emily Tebron, while she was under anesthesia , and fled with the family's assets, including the house deed, to Armenia. Marge Ashkidian looked two stories down at the noon waste lot with its fronting sign FOR SALE BLEVINS REALTY in black and SOLD across the sign diagonally in red, and wished she'd been able to buy it and build a house just for her and her daughters, with it lined by those graceful bending willows at the farther rim. Even though above them another dominoed pile ofcondos spilled down. The willows trembled in a slight breeze, as a trapezoidal cloud passed in front ofthe sun, and whispered to each other "we're doomed, we're doomed," being able to sense the buildings closing in on each side. The trapezoidal cloud tried to duck away from the sun, but couldn't hit the right air current and vaporized on its spaceward side, for a moment appearing rimmed by gold to people in Appalachia, just as Russell's granddaddy's walker hit the weedy ground with a grind and he yelled "Careful, sonny!" and Fred Waage, a professor ofEnglish at East Tennessee State University, is a native ofIthaca, New Tork. He received his education at Princeton and taught at Rutgers University . After relocating to the mountains ofEast Tennessee, he became thefoundingeditor oftheAppalachian magazine Now and Then, on whose editorialboardhe continuesto serve. Waage'spoetry and fiction have appeared in small magazines, and he haspublished in scholarlyjournals on various topics. 47 "Where's the sun?" watched from the condos above the willows by Latefa Fugate, theirAfrican-American owner, who was inspecting a newly vacated unit, wishing there were more black men in East Tennessee, and waiting to sign papers with its purchaser, Elroy "Black WoIP Smith, who she did not realize was black, and who at the very minute was driving past Russell's car pulled off Greenshrub Drive, ready to turn onto Hillrise, and thinking with satisfaction how surprised Marge Ashkidian would be when she got the certified letter in the mail informing her that dividends earned by the funds held by Smith Securities in her name, and forgotten by her absconsive husband, had been used by him as a down-payment, in her name, on the very vacant lot Russell's bent granddaddy was awkwardly bouncing himselfover as Russell carped "I've only got an hour for this and to get you back, Papaw," and his granddaddy kept repeatedly motioning with his head just as impatiently: "Get ahead of me, now! Swing that thing! Stay ahead! Watch where I'm going!" and Russell yelled back "How can I watch where you're going ifI stay ahead ofyou," and his granddaddy yelled forward "Use the goddam' eyes in the back of your head. Ain't all you young folks got 'em?" We were in the center ofthe world when Ifirst built it, and she wasjust sixteen but at the center of my world then as golden as the thirty...