Time has no interest in the tears I'm struggling to hold in, setting me back a pace or two so that I can blink and clear my vision before restarting the plod toward completing my delivery. Time will only proclaim our tardiness or punctuality, but never the why's or the how's. I'm certain that time is the coldest river through which our lives course.
Everyday I count down the seconds until I can drop my sack at the warehouse—the last delivery of the day—and make my way to her.
The job’s not a pleasant experience, but the physical burdens are old and familiar and whisper the most important stories of my life.
Aching left shoulder—each step pinging the shooting pain from the pinched nerve from the time I barely pulled her out away from that charging rabid dog so many years ago.
Right index finger and its phantom itch—the tip of the digit clean off when we were building a pretty wooden house for the robins and sparrows she loved to watch out her bedroom window.
Stomach gurgling from hunger—I use every last cent so that she can eat real food while I chew on some stale bread. My stomach thinks it's hungry. But her smile from the extra cookie keeps me full for weeks.
The last sack—the last delivery—it’s the one I work towards all day. Because it’s the foyer right outside the entryway leading into another evening—another moment—with her.
It hasn’t always been this way. I was just a boy once. And then a teen, and a young man getting into the trouble that young men get into. I had no connections to anybody or anything—not really. And I thought I was happy. Or at least content. One day of nothing merging seamlessly into the next.
Then there was her.
There was Everything.
And now, somehow, it truly does feel like it’s been this way in life—this way with us forever.
Or, rather, it feels like it had been that way forever.
Before the nightly dancing, and singing, and jumping, and skipping, turned into evenings spent bedside. Industrial bleached floors. Sterile smiles from overworked interns.
I used to count the seconds until the end of my last delivery. But now I can’t.
Time has turned on me.
Time speeds forward—seemingly faster each day—and I walk beside it—within it. Time propels each step...and, through my anger, it’s to Time that I quietly pray.
It’s my new song but it’s the oldest song in the universe.
“Time. Flow past her slowly. Freeze these moments. Change Your path—part around us and let us stay here together, long-forgotten by Your minions crouching outside the door, lying in wait, ever patient for Your order to deliver the final 'gift' from You to her.”
And my prayer will be lost in Time.
Contest Picture on Which Story is BasedBecause today I’m going to deliver the final sack to the store and the lady at the counter won’t look me in the eye. The warehouse workers will heave the sack off my shoulders before adding an unbearable weight.
I’ll be told.
She'll have gotten her 'gift' from Time. I’ll know that she now has eternity—that she's forever awash in the infinite, outside the reach of Time’s seductive dark touch.
And then Time will see fit to torture me. To make his suffering servant a slave.
Each sack, each delivery, each breath—each moment still here—Time will make slower than the last.
“Time?” I’ll ask every night. “Why? Why did You do this?”
She danced to Your rhythm. She clapped to the beat like You’d made it just for her. She touched her great-grandmother’s wrinkles, fascinated by the lines grooved into place over years by Your constant touch.
She loved keeping track of our days—of Yourdays—happily using Your minutes and seconds and hours, as if You had reached into the fire of Creation and forged the intervals as a special present for her and her alone. She reveled in the gift of understanding You.
“Nine minutes until Daddy’s home, right? And after we wash our hands, then five minutes only!”
Her favorite toy was a clock. Did You know that? It was a cow-clock that moo’d when she pressed its head. In bed, after she became too weak to get up and play, she would spend hours just staring—smiling—at the second hand ticking away. One time she laughed and smiled up at me. ‘If the clock breaks, will time stop?’
“Time never stops” I said, working harder than I'd ever worked before to arrange my face into a smile, “No matter what.”
“I like that,” she said.
She loved You so much.
And now You’ve sent her as far away from You as can be (and forever!) without even a moment to spare? Not a brief pause? I was ten minutes away. Ten minutes! Do You understand that? Not even a single second for one more smile? A moment—a measly, barely noticeable moment, dammit, to hold her hand and feel her little fingers squeeze back? You give me Nothing! Nothing! Not even an incalculable infinitesimal for a goodbye, a final thought, a simple glance! Nothing! You frame existence with Your decrepit lurch, all forward and no back, taking everything and everyone towards an infinite nothingness stranded apart from Being, without any hope of returning to her... her, the one who loved You and embraced You and Accepted You as You are...her who You’ve vomited out of your purview into an abandoned emptiness while I’m stuck within You, surrounded by Your stench and your filth, and I can’t get to her now, so I sit and think and dream and wonder how she is, even though I know that the only answer to that question is that horrifying realization that if she "is" then she can be only utterly and completely alone!
You've done this. And I hate You.
But she loved You. Her little cow-clock. Her dancing. Counting the minutes until Daddy came home from work.
So I’ll stay around. I’ll let You push me along.
But only because she loved You.
Only because she would have begged me to let Your current guide me along. She would have demanded—with tiny foot stomps for emphasis—to ride Your wake forward and joyfully at that.
And so we'll go forward together. Perhaps not joyfully. But forever forward.
Time rages ahead and in its storm we suddenly find and lose wonders. It’s accepting the churn and the swirl that somehow makes this disastrous cosmic catastrophe something worthy of Beauty.
Something worthy of her.