One Second.

A Very Short Story.

          Walking to the head of the stairs, I am paused-- stalled like a soft breath in cold stillness. A note floats from the record player in the corner and haltingly snaps and pops. It's an F-sharp and it draws across the room like a thin pencil line hanging in the air before disintegrating and floating to the floor. Tilting my head slightly I look out the window and see the sun as it's sliding down to a last glint of blinding red light. It glints through a gap in the leaves of a dying papaw tree.

'Why did they think that papaw would survive here? The summers are much too dry.'

The leaves look stressed, sapped of life. It is still a long time before they finally will let go and mercifully fall to the dusty ground.

I see the sun's now golden sliver shrinking as if in slow motion, before finally disappearing with a scintillant flash, the size of a pin head, then gone. It leaves a hot orange glow shimmering through the tree and a white pin in my forward vision. I blink and the pin is blue at first and fades through green, yellow, and red my consciousness focuses on it and seems to slide in deeper as if it were a gravitational worm hole compelling my mind slip inside.

          'Where is she? She is usually so punctual.' It’s a quality I have grown to admire in people: punctuality. It takes a caring and intent, two things she has always had an abundance of. I anticipate hearing her ritual of arrival at any moment. First the rusty shed door squeals in protest as she forces it open and again to curse her as she shuts and locks it after putting her bike away. Then the front door opens and the sigh of relief slowly escapes her lips as she feels the warm air of home wrap her cold bones.

          Dusk is a perilous time to ride a bike. Even with the frenetic strobe of LED lights. There is a certain chimerical affect in the graying fade of twilight that seems to make everything else succumb to its deviltry. Light fades. Attention fades. Memories fade.

          She feels her knee buckle, compressed between the aluminum and steel on one side and the painted plastic and glass on the other as they dig into her skin. Out of the corner of her eye she sees something. Despite the shock and pain and rush of blood and adrenaline, she sees it. It is blue-- opaque at first, then it starts to glisten as little ripples and waves manifest and begin to appear. Frozen drops of rain seem to fall from the sky, skittering along, then flowing down over the edge of the rippling blue. She finds that she is looking down through the crystalline waters of a tropical sea and she can see fish of every color. Blue, yellow, purple. Neon. So bright, they seem independent and free from the water they swim in, as if suspended in a frenetic dance above the beige and greenish sand that they hover and dart over.

          Lazily looking sideways, through a suspended animation, she sees me, and in my eyes, the future, as if compressed in an illustrated timeline from a history book. As she gazes she feels herself shrinking and falling. Falling forward towards that future. It is as if gravity tilts while at the same time she grows smaller and smaller in a horizontal free-fall to the depths within my eyes. She sees my eyes widen as she flies directly towards the iris. Deeper and deeper into these soul windows she flies. It becomes like a flight over a land and place that circles underneath her like that of endless lifetimes. She can see the colors in my eyes transform into the sheep covered hills of Ireland, the Grand Canyon, and Mayan temples. Places where God and man created hand in hand the miracles and wonder. She flies as if she were flying miles above, and yet walks barefoot, feeling earth press against her feet. She kneels down and pushes her hands against the soft damp earth, feeling them make deep impressions in the soil.
          Suddenly my hand is pressing against and enfolding hers. Hand in hand we fly and we walk through the air and upon the soils of this earth together. We see the wonders of providence and of man. We see the people and places that would become the portrait of our lives. The hues of their personalities cascading out from love and pain and sacrifice and grief and victory to paint our conjoined consciousness. Painting us from the inside until it spills out and we shine with both light and dark all that we will experience together in this life.

          The light waned. As it did, it was the faded memories of another time that held on to that second. That stretched it thin. Thin like a young mother’s patience with an unexpected layoff. As thin as a the line connecting a young mother’s budget for food and need for rent...or maintaining a car. As thin as the wire to the right headlight that loses the strength to carry the current to spark the halogen to warn of the cyclist coming in the hazy air of the impending night. It took less than a second to feel the tears come into her eyes, to shut them momentarily while wiping the salty despair from their lids. It took the rest of that second to see the flash of the strobe disappear with the sun in front of the car’s blue hood and the lightless, and now lifeless, vacuum of that right headlight.