#cayley

Cayley again! With her extended family.

An order 4 permutohedron.

Quoting Wikipedia, “In mathematics, the permutohedron of order n (also spelled permutahedron) is an (n − 1)-dimensional polytope embedded in an n-dimensional space, the vertices of which are formed by permuting the coordinates of the vector (1, 2, 3, ..., n). More generally, the term describes any polyhedron which is the convex hull of a free orbit of the symmetric group Sn acting naturally on R^n. The edge-graph of any permutohedron is the Cayley graph of Sn with respect to the generating set of adjacent transpositions (1,2), . . . , (n − 1,n).”

I’d been a sports reporter for the regional paper for a few months at the time of the incident. The job up until then was pretty simple: interview a high school senior who is good at throwing a football, question some local coaches about their goals for the new season (”win more”), and keep the propane-fired 318 under the hood of my massively-corroded, rust-on-rust ‘72 GMC pickup on just this side of Charon’s river.

That morning opened like any other. The sun came up, illuminating the pile of spilled empties on the front porch of the Legion, and I stirred to a hesitant wakefulness. Work beckoned: there was a big curling tournament down at the Arena. I’d known for weeks that this was the Huge One. Not a hair could be out of place. If I fucked up even a single word of my coverage, I was going to be crucified in the town centre, surrounded by John Deere meshback caps squealing in orgasmic delight at my disemboweling and choking death.

In case you’ve never heard of it, let me stop the action for a second to tell you about the important details of curling. You’ve got a big-ass stone, you throw it, and the other members of your team sweep in front of it to try and reduce friction. It’s like shufflepuck.

I’ve never seen a man’s throat get slit at shufflepuck before.

I knew Vernon Wright. He was the owner of the little corner store that I would sometimes drop by in order to pick up the microwave fajitas that sufficed for nutrition. Sort of like a Vietnam-era marine, I had “gone native” and picked up a taste for them when I had been visiting every rural arena in the province. Their little hot food booths were irresistable: I could not help but to test the limits of the health inspector’s watchful eye.