Time

Impossible

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

That’s how she knew she had stepped through. Thirteen hours on the clock. The impossible hour. Her breath froze and shattered as another puff left her nostrils. Humans weren’t meant to be here. Well, here wasn’t exactly the right word. Weren’t meant to be… now? Whatever; she needed to get her proof and find a way out before it was too late.

Her fingers, already growing numb, fumbled with the lens cover on her camera. Impossibly, the camera felt warm; maybe it wasn’t the day that was cold after all. She gripped the thing firmly and turned in a slow circle,eyes squinting into the too bright sky.

A – creature – stared at her unblinking from twenty feet away. She thought it wasn’t blinking; she couldn’t seem to focus on it properly. As if it wasn’t quite, well, possible. And it was sort of sitting in mid air, which was really beginning to wig her out. She hastily raised the camera and pressed the button.

The creature squawked and vanished at the same time that the camera disintegrated in a loud black rumbling puff. The clock face cracked and the hands spun out of control. Ice crept up from the ground, locking her in place, and her scream was a silent crystal shooting from her nerveless mouth.

Wait

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This morning I found myself reflecting on my husband’s and my history. When I was a teenager my family attended an annual lecture series at the small college he attended. The students were responsible for a lot of logistics as part of their education, so we would have run into each other multiple times over the course of those weeks. He was 18-20, I was 14-16; we weren’t on each other’s radar and have no memory of meeting at all during that time. Ten years later, a mutual friend introduced us, and the rest is history.

There have been times I wished we had met earlier, had all that time to spend together. The truth is that if we had met as kids we probably wouldn’t be together now. Those ten years shaped the characteristics that drew us together, characteristics that we did not possess as teenagers. We both went through things: failed relationships, first jobs, successes and failures, and other challenges that helped us discover independently who we were. By the time we found each other’s orbit we both understood what we were looking for and how to recognize it.

It is a lesson I have worked very hard to take to heart. So often we try to rush life, demanding whatever we want in the moment as if the course of our lives depends upon it. We push harder and harder, younger and younger, and look back on our lives with regret and bitterness that our rushed decisions didn’t produce the fruit we wanted. My life would look very different now without those ten years. I would likely have ended up marrying one of those failed relationships I mentioned and it would still have failed, or chasing one of those challenges in a fruitless search for fulfillment. Even if a second opportunity to meet had arisen I would likely have rejected it based on first impressions, never realizing the change time could produce.

There is a right time for the right things to happen in our lives. We have to learn to appreciate the wait. Waiting is not wasted time; it’s growing time. What do you choose to learn from your experiences? What changes are you willing to make after your failures? What do you learn about yourself from relationship challenges, and what characteristics do you learn to pursue? No one knows what they really want until they have experienced all of those aspects of life. Celebrate the wait.

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At first glance the room seemed frozen in time, it’s antiquated charm untouched by the decades. A closer look revealed a different story entirely. The light streaming in the windows cast shadows that hid threadbare patches in the aging carpet. In a far corner, disguised by carefully arranged furniture, a square of plywood barely covered a hole where the floor had begun to rot away.

Worn depressions in the chair cushions told the story of generations, the books whose spines crumbled behind the glass testifying to the many hands that had opened them over the years. One windowsill showed more evidence of water damage than the other, its tracks rubbed nearly free of paint. Perhaps it had been the favorite spot of some long-gone housewife, a pleasant breeze blowing through loose strands of her hair while she mended some article of clothing.

The one thing not fading stood beneath a glass dome in a place of honor on a central table. The roses could have been placed there within the hour, so fresh and full of life were their white petals. Only the photograph the visitor held belied the impression. In it the room itself was newer, black and white print capturing the faces of a young family who couldn’t help glancing at each other instead of the camera. The same bouquet stood in its case, every blossom and leaf exactly the same.

The visitor hesitated, rumors in the town holding his foot at the threshold. With a laugh he replaced the photograph in his pocket and shrugged. He stepped into the room and froze. With a shriek of horror he clutched at his face and tried to flee, but there was no escape. He could only watch in the mirror as his body grayed, wrinkled, stooped, and finally crumbled to dust. The photograph caught a small draft where it lay on the carpet and fluttered across the threshold into the hall outside. The white roses stood motionless in their case, endless life in the midst of decay.

Inexorable

He had lived his entire life in its shadow. Gazing up its sides with jaws agape like the tourists he ferried. Losing himself in the whispering roar of its invisible flow.

His boat had been a favorite; no one knew the glacier like he did. Every pop, every boom, was a message. His passengers returned again and again for the thrill of watching the birth of icebergs, the formation of bridges, and the crumbling of secret worlds.

When not on the boat he had walked the white expanse of its surface. He could walk the same path every week for a year and never become bored. Crevasses opened and sealed. Turquoise pools formed and drained and left intricate honeycombed tunnels that summoned impotent longing. Caves appeared and just as magically vanished again as snow became ice and slid to its eventual doom.

Ten years ago he had ferried his last load of gasping, camera happy tourists. His body, like the ice, cracked and moaned under the weight of time passing, and at eighty-two, the crevasses in his memory formed honeycomb of their own. But he remembered the glacier. She had been the love of his life. He had pored over her ever-changing yet changeless face every day for sixty years, extolled her unpredictable beauty to hundreds of thousands who marveled with him. He remembered the glacier.

The Square

It was an odd place, cobblestone streets and medieval plaster houses confusingly paired with modern storefronts and colorful canvas awnings. Agatha loved it. Every birthday and anniversary, she insisted we have lunch at the little bistro on the tiny mishmash of a square.

The city had long since turned the houses into a retirement village, which meant that the crowds tended decidedly toward the downward side of the hill, if you know what I mean. I asked Agatha on one birthday somewhere in her early thirties why she preferred the square to any of the popular and romantic downtown spots. She said she couldn’t think of anything more romantic than the square.

Agatha loved watching people, and I loved watching her, so I rarely saw what she saw. But that day she made me pull my chair next to hers and look out over the square. She showed me the couple at the next table whose wrinkled fingers entwined as they sipped black coffee from plain mugs. She showed me the elderly man pushing his wife around in her chair while she chattered excitedly about the window displays in the little shops. She showed me the three sisters with bobbed hair and oversized handbags who made the same round of the square every day, just for the chance to be together.

For thirty years she made me promise we would retire to the square. She never saw her wish come true. Today would have been her 65th birthday, and for thirteen years I have ridden the elevator from my fourth floor plaster-walled apartment to sit under the green umbrella in front of the bistro. Now I watch the young people who occasionally visit, wondering what they are thinking, what Agatha would have made of them. They are different these days, yet the same. I wonder if one day that boy with eyes for only one person will sit here fifty years from now, and hope that bright-eyed girl he adores will be holding his hand over a mug of coffee.

Seasons

She stretched her nearly thawed wings to brush the trees on either side. How much fun dancing among the branches had been, their bare bones crackling beneath the ice of her feathers. How delighted she had been by the cooling that had silenced the world and dressed her in crystal lace. The touch of her dancing feet had adorned every surface with a shining imitation of her, and the flakes that fell from her fluttering wings left white drifts into which she plunged again and again in gleeful abandon.

How strange when warmth began to creep upon her, first little more than an odd spark within her belly but quickly growing to melt her lacy garment thread by thread. The warm drops that fell from her exploded with color where they landed, transforming her playground into an artist’s palette. Silence slowly filled with song and chatter. The wind that had played with her became drunk on her increasing warmth and ripped the melting ice from her wings to fling it to the ground where it sprouted green in soggy puddles.

Soon enough she understood. The warmth had tired her, left her sitting or walking quietly among the blossoms, until her body could no longer contain it. Her child, this flame that had transformed her, hovered near her with the uncertainty of infancy. Wings still unformed, she blinked at the world from the familiarity of her mother’s palms. Her mother fed the last of her strength into the child, who sprouted wings of flame and hurtled skyward with all the enthusiasm of youth. Her fire would grow until the world reflected it’s brilliance, then cool in the last fling of youth before the birth of her own spring.

The Dust Siren

“Come with me, my lord,” she whispered in his ear. She was perfect, enchanting in her beauty. She laughed, silver notes of music, and caught his fingertips with hers as she danced lightly away. He followed, allowing the touch to remain. She twirled with delight, the hem of her robe indistinguishable from the dust on the path for one distracting moment.

“Where shall we go, my lady?” he asked, held captive by the gray that seemed to whirl in her irises. The city faded from memory, the path disappeared beneath his feet. He cared nothing for where his sandals carried him so long as that laughing smile flashed before him.

“Eat with me, my lord,” she crooned, leading him to a gray couch beside a laden table. She sat beside him as he lay back, a bowl of sweet plums in her hand. Her lithe fingers slipped one between her teeth, rosy lips closing over it just as its juice began to flow. His own mouth parted, and he leaned toward her, his hand reaching out to touch her arm with reverence. She blushed winningly and popped another fruit into his mouth with a giggle.

“Stay with me, my lord,” she pleaded, running a hand through his hair. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, her scent of earth and dried grasses filling his senses. Her fingers stroked his forehead as he drowsed with his head in her lap. His own hands played with the folds of her gown as it seemed to flow through his fingers.

“I must sleep, my lady,” he whispered, arms drooping weakly from the couch to trail in the dust. She wailed in anguish, slipping from beneath his head to kneel beside him. He felt her arms around him, as if her skin blended with his. Strange, he thought as he fixed his eyes upon her face. The color faded from her cheeks, leaving nothing but gray that matched her eyes.

“Come back to me, my lord,” she wept to the skull that lay alone in the dirt. The tatters of her robe formed furrows in her skin as she buried her colorless face in one crumbling hand. The wind blew across the bare ground, lifting dirty clouds into the air to obscure the ruin of his city in the distance. She knelt there, cracked and crumbling, in the accusing gaze of his empty bones.