Fiction: In the Fullness of Time

Summer Meadow

In the Fullness of Time©

P. J. Grath

The air was sweet with the heavy scent of roses, reminding her of her grandmother’s house, especially the front porch of that simple little house, a porch all but hidden beneath a wild forest of climbing crimson blooms, screening a child dreaming over a book from the eyes of passers-by. Full-blown, she thought. Then, to bloom, to blow, the archaic verb coming to mind like a petal on the breeze, as it had every spring and summer since she had first learned of the old usage.

The plum trees were also in blossom, but the oddity of plum and rose blooming simultaneously escaped her attention because she had eyes only for the man coming toward her from the barn with quick steps, his eyes bright and hair tousled. “Time to mow soon,” he said, adding, “as it always is.” And he was enfolding her in his strong arms, and at the same time she was in some other space, light and white and clear and open and bare, and a different voice was explaining a new world to her.

“But who are you?” she asked the stranger, searching for even a single comprehensible fact to counter an impossible reality her mind could not compass.

“You may call me Michael, if you need a name for me. It doesn’t matter.”

She couldn’t see him and could barely distinguish his voice from her own, the only apparent difference being that he was the teller and she the questioner ... for now. Who said, “for now”? Had either of them spoken those words?

“Give me the basic outline one more time, please,” she requested, knowing he would comply. “We have all the time in the world, don’t we?”

“One more time, a thousand times, it’s all the same,” Michael answered. “Because there is no more time. There are no more ‘times.’ No more events, nothing happening or changing or growing or sickening or suffering or dying. Do you remember your ancient and medieval philosophy? The concept of perfection? A circle complete, with nothing more to be added. Well, time is complete. And so, it ceases to exist.”

“Perfection and nonexistence – that’s contradiction,” she objected.

“Think of it, rather, as a paradox,” he suggested gently.

She looked around her. The white light contained, as she could now see, all colors, some of them quite new to her eyes, and she pushed Michael further with her questions. “When did it happen?” she asked. “When did time become complete?” Her thoughts whirled, and her heart beat like a pow-wow drum, colors flashing by her eyes like the lights of a city seen at night, close-up, from the window of a speeding train. And yet all was calm and still.

“There is no ‘when’ to fullness,” Michael replied patiently, and she seemed to hear a smile in his voice.

“Well, am I dead then?” she demanded. You would question St. Peter himself, she heard her mother say, and she was nine years old, insisting on answers her mother gently urged her to “take on faith,” something else she had never managed to do, either as a girl in seersucker pajamas or a woman with more practical concerns. Home was the classroom where the subject was philosophy, where questions were demanded as urgently as answers. Home? But home, too, the woods in spring and autumn, the wildflowers and mushrooms and fall colors, her dog bounding eagerly ahead and then turning to wait for her. Home that bedroom in Paris, with the cooing of pigeons echoing in the airshaft every morning. And home every evening, wherever they might be, the marriage bed, the perfect circle of her husband’s arms around her.

“Do you feel dead?” Michael’s voice asked.

“No, not at all.”

“Do you have a memory of dying?”

“What? Would I remember anything at all if I were dead?”

“What do you think? Do you think the dead have memories? Or, ask yourself this: do the dead have sensations...?” His voice faded off, and there was no more white, bare space but green grass and blue sky again, and clean, white sheets blowing on the clothesline in the bright sunshine, and her grandmother – her mother’s mother, it was – pushing back and forth, with her feet, a metal glider bench in the shade, a bowl of green beans in her ample lap, fresh from the garden, her hands busy snapping the ends of the beans, stripping the "strings," while out beyond, behind the garden, her grandfather – her mother’s stepfather, he was – went about his slow, steady work of pruning back raspberry canes, bees lazily humming about his head, and all around rose the sweet smell of earth and growing things. In the distance a train whistle sounded, and she knew it to be her other grandfather, coming to the crossing where they often drove in the car to wave at him as his engine sped by, and she knew his second wife, her other grandmother, was making a salad of the bright, ripe, red tomatoes from his tiny garden behind their old, brick, two-story house on the tree-shaded street in Ohio.

“And with time complete,” she said aloud, addressing herself to Michael and trusting that he would be wherever she was, “there is no more dying, is that right?”

“No more change of any kind,” he confirmed.

“But those who died, in time – that is, before completion -- ?”

Again she heard a smile in his reply. “They live in your memory, as they always have and always will.”

At tables under the sheltering maples, on blankets spread on the grass, on the porch swing and strolling at the edge of the meadow, and in the halls of old university buildings and in the streets of cities and on quiet country roadsides, they were all with her, but not seeming at all a crowd. Instead she saw only one or two or three at a time, as they had been together in time. And she was also onstage with her high school orchestra and standing on a bridge in Paris, looking down the Seine, and singing blues in a dim, smoky club.

“But it wasn’t all good....”

“Again, recall the older philosophies. Did evil have substance? No, it was but a turning away from good, from God. All pain and suffering were temporary results of the absence of perfection. Hence -- .”

“That’s too simple!” she objected.

“So think of it another way: the bad parts simply don’t bear remembering. And in the fullness of time, whatever you are experiencing you are, in reality, remembering.”

“But then I’m selecting and leaving out -- .”

“So go back to the first explanation. Why turn away from perfection?”

Another problem formed in her thoughts. The very fact of my failure of understanding implies a lack, an imperfection. Furthermore, this very conversation implies ongoing thought, by definition incomplete at every step....

“Do you think we are having this conversation for the first time?” Michael asked her, although she had not spoken aloud. “You are remembering it. You are, in fact, remembering many conversations, and you are remembering them, reliving them, because you have always loved such conversations, because you have always felt most alive when asking such questions of yourself and others. There is no contradiction. With the fullness of time, love also is complete, including your love of argumentation, with no one telling you any longer to cease from questioning or arguing....”

Again Michael’s voice faded, lost on the breeze. Where he had seemed to stand, off to her side, appeared frolicking dogs, entering into her field of vision joyously, ears flapping, tails wagging, eyes shining bright. There was the first Ginger, their first family dog, as spry as Ginger II, a puppy now and always, as well as canine companions of later years, joining the Gingers, all of them alive and healthy and happy and playing together.

It is all quite impossible, she mused. Perhaps all of it might exist in one brief millisecond of her conscious imagination. Perhaps there was nothing more to it than that. 

But she saw no sense in rejecting any part of it. Not the gardens, any of them, and certainly not the old friends and dogs all come back, or her grandparents, the train whistle, the scent of roses on the breeze, laundry on the line. Not the soft cheeping of baby chicks and contented sounds of hens hovering nearby that she heard now, along with the neighing of a horse from the pasture. Her horse. Her chickens.

No, it only made sense for her to take her comfortable ease in a cushiony chaise recliner beneath her grandfather’s old standard apple tree, where there in dappled shade someone handed her baby son to her, and she took him again in her arms and gazed down at that beautiful child. He was miraculously complete and perfect, from the downy, sweet-smelling crown of his head to his tiny, pearly pink shells of toenails, and nothing was wanting, truly, nothing missing in all the world.

Northport, Michigan

March 26, 2014

Short Story: "Everything Is Useful"

Everything Is Useful©

“Nothing is garbage, nothing is junk! There is nothing on earth that deserves to be wasted!” She was screaming as if he stood a block away from her instead of mere feet. “Everything that exists is part of this earth and deserves respect, just like the earth deserves respect!” Her tone was belligerent, as if they were in the middle of a long, drawn-out argument, but his feeling was that she had started arguing years before, maybe with the world rather than any particular individual.

So far he had only said hello, in order to start the conversation his professor had assigned. Now he blinked and consulted the scrap of paper in his hand. Talk to a homeless person. How old does this person look? Find out how the he or she lives. What kind of life events led the person to street life? What color are his or her eyes?

As he glanced down at his notes, the tiny old woman paused to catch her breath, hacking her lungs out and leaning on the grocery cart holding her little mountain of assorted belongings. None of it junk, according to her, he reminded himself, mentally rolling his eyes. Yeah, right. Precious filthy blankets and innumerable plastic bags of priceless treasures! Her chest was sunken, shoulders rounded, and thin, wispy grey hair peeked out from under the knitted cap she wore. Her fingernails were cracked and black with dirt. A beautiful long-haired white cat, crouching in a carrier on the shelf underneath the cart’s heaped-to-overflowing basket, a cat so immaculate and perfectly groomed it could have been entered in a show, added an incongruous note.

“So, is that your cat?” the young man asked to divert her from her tirade.

She peered up at him and countered his idle question with a sharp rhetorical query of her own. “Who else’s cat would it be?” Then she smiled, slyness replacing suspicion in a surprising instant. “Or maybe he belongs to himself, eh? Cats have lives of their own, you know.” She narrowed her eyes and grinned, quite the Cheshire cat herself.

“Yeah, well, that one’s in a cage, isn’t it?” He couldn’t keep the note of sarcasm out of his voice. He wouldn’t have taken this class at all except that it was required, and he couldn’t see for the life of him what the point was, and whenever he was confused or unsure of himself, his go-to position was sarcasm.

“Do you want to let him out?” she asked in a strange, wheedling tone.

“What?” He almost jumped, startled by the surprising question.

The old woman began to nod vigorously, then to shake her head from side to side. “Yeah, you know all about cats, don’t you? You’re a bright boy. Go ahead – open the crate and let him out! What’s your name, anyway?”

“Pete!” he answered nervously. “My name is Pete.” What did she care what his name was? Maybe he should have given a false name?

He started to back away, but she grabbed his arm. “Peter, you want to give this cat its freedom? Let it live its own life? I’m telling you, go ahead and let it out!”

Traffic streamed by at highway speeds. When he had first spotted the woman, he thought she couldn’t be safe that close of the road, but there was no sidewalk out here. Nor were there stop signs or lights at the closest intersection. A cat running loose on this road wouldn’t have a prayer! What kind of crazy game was the old woman playing?

He straightened his shoulders and shot her an angry, supercilious look, turned away and stalked back to his car. The hell with her!

That evening he called a girl in his class, using the encounter with the street woman as his excuse for the call but hoping the conversation would move on quickly to more interesting ground. He told the girl about the old woman, her cart, and the cat.

“What color were her eyes?” the girl asked.

“The cat’s eyes?”

“No, Peter. You were supposed to note the eye color of the person you talked to, remember?” There was a short silence before she asked, “What color are my eyes, Peter?”

He had no idea. But he did suddenly have a glimmer of possible lessons he might pick up in college, things he hadn’t known he didn’t know until that moment.

 - P. J. Grath

Detour: Fiction

[The morning after watching an Elia Kazan film, "America, America," I woke up with the beginning of this story in my head, so I got up and started writing. Clearly, the film was my inspiration, although the events in my story were not in Kazan's, and his setting is not mine.]

Once It Begins, It Goes On and On©

P. J. Grath

Here is a picture of my beloved, so big and strong he was! That morning he went to church with his sister, it happened. He never came home, and now I will never marry. That is reality in our little village.

It was not always so. We all used to live together like a family. The Alwadi people and the Mazawa people went to school together, farmed together, owned businesses together, married each other, – anything you can imagine people doing here, we did together, despite tribal and religious differences. The old ones remember that way of life, but all the young ones know is hatred. What no one can recall is how the old way gave way and became what it is today. It is as if it happened overnight, but surely that cannot be so, can it?

My own father was Mazawa. He was killed in the first fighting. By an Alwadi? I will never know, and that’s best, because my mother, after all, is Alwadi. Which am I? You tell me. When I have to leave the house, I go with my face covered and my head down. We no longer have friends or neighbors. No one can trust anyone.

What I am telling, this big change, if it did happen overnight, it had to have happened the night before my father was killed, but my thinking cannot wrap around that thought and push it back further, because everyone, Alwadi and Mazawa, loved my father. There was no reason for anyone to kill him. An accident it had to be. But if he had fallen from a roof or been kicked in the head by a mule – other ways of dying by accident – no one would have thought of revenge. So, since revenge was the first thought, hatred must have begun already in men’s minds, mustn’t it? Could one man start such hatred? Who could it have been? Why? Over what? It seems impossible, and yet it had to start somewhere before it could spread, isn’t it so?

What a shame my beloved’s sister came back here! She had married and was living in Morocco, safely out of the way. Then her husband died. She’d had a child and wanted to bring him back to her own home to raise him. Stupid! What kind of future does a boy have here? If she hadn’t come back, would her brother have been in church with her that morning? No, he would have been safe, she would have been safe, her child would have been safe.

Naturally, the bomb was set off on the men’s side of the church, so his sister, on the other side with her baby boy, escaped unharmed. Physically unharmed, that is. The men were buried in the rubble of the church’s collapse.

This is all I have now – this grave to visit, this photograph to hold. If I could find the man who started all this, I would kill him with my own hands. It would not bring back my beloved, but what else have I to live for if not revenge?

4/2/2013