The Forgotten One (Identity-Splitting FLASH FICTION!)

[NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I know it's easier to believe that we are right: the world is round, the forces of gravity hold the universe together, and what cannot be measured and reproduced in a controlled environment is fantasy. I find it much harder to believe we are wrong; that the world  might not operate the way we all believe it does; that very fabric of reality is teaming with vibrations beyond measurement or reproduction, and the human body may well extend beyond its physical form in an efflorescing jellyfish of consciousness. 

We simply don't know. 

But one doesn't need to know to write fiction. One has only to surrender to the river yet unquantified by science. 

Imagination...]

They wheeled the body in, talking about their shift, about the rain, about what they planned to do when the world was done sickening and they could finally get some rest. The doctors were young and ambitious, joking as they monitored vitals. 

Not once did they look at the vagrant’s face, swollen and purple beneath its beard.

A nurse entered with cups of coffee. “What’s the story here?”

The dark-haired surgeon shrugged, took the cup and sipped. “A drunk. Wandered into the road. A dumptruck did the rest.”

“Trash,” agreed the other doctor, lighter of hair and eye. “Water seeks its own level.”

The nurse stared down into the swollen face. “Will he live?”

Dark Hair looked doubtful. “Maybe if he was a starfish. His spleen is crushed, his ribs are broken. That unsightly swelling is a parietal fracture. The wound's too tumid to incise. Fate's got this one in its clutches.”

The nurse sipped. “Fate…”

“Feeding Always … The Eternal,” Light Hair grinned, pleased with his morbid acronym.

The sky darkened, though it was scarcely noon. Shadows crept across the scarred linoleum floors, and eventually the doctors left. The nurse looked long and hard into the swollen face, this creature forgotten by the world. 

“Who were you?” He stroked the matted beard. “Where did you grow up? What did you dream when you were small? Was it this?”

The nurse looked back to make sure they were alone. He closed the privacy curtain and stretched the vein-burst eyelids open between his fingers, searching for a spark, a recognition. “Why did you let this happen?”

***

Floating up, becoming vapor, every dream and impulse fraying into a thousand glowing strands. The Forgotten One had watched the dumptruck pull away into an alley, leaving his body twisted in a growing pool of blood. It had been strange looking down into his eyes, but only for an instant.

In the moments following he had understood what a butterfly must feel when gazing at its broken chrysalis.

Lights and milling bodies; a padded steel gurney wheeling the broken shape; circling lights that danced in shattered warehouse windows; the wail of sirens and gasps of shock when less-seasoned technicians witnessed the carnage that lay shattered upon the gurney.

Through bright halls the Forgotten One followed, a cloud absorbing every fiber of this smaller, feebler world, seeing lives removed of linear arrangement and reduced to a single glowing light.

The doctors came and went. And then the other sat by his bed, asking questions. Until now The Forgotten One could hear no voices, only a churning static hiss.

But now he heard.

Who were you?

He saw a boy running in open grass, crying in his mother’s arms; a boy afraid of darkness and the sounds of thunder, but most of all his father; and then, on the brink of comfort, a boy paralyzed in a city he could never love, the barking peddlers, the shops and taverns of broken glass; a boy trying so hard to be a man that all memories of open country bled away. And mother sickening in her bed, staring up with rheumy eyes as if he were a spirit sent there to twist her last breath around his claw, calling him strange names and begging him not to touch her; Father cold and silent as a winter storm; and the boy, now a man, lost, unable to lean on these collapsing pillars; a boy running again, only now without knowing where the road would lead.

Where did you grow up?

He saw the fields of eastern Washington, the apple trees set in ranks across a carpet of yellow grass, the birds and bugs and fields that seemed to breathe when the wind blew hot down from the highlands; the possibility dilated in every inch of that masterless country.

What did you dream when you were small?

He saw things unburdened by the imposition of adulthood, the mysteries that had stretched in all directions, the adventures, such adventures, hiding in the gardens of tomorrow, like roots waiting to be pulled into the world.

Why did you let this happen?

It was then the earth stopped moving beneath him, as the cogs and sprockets of some unearthly clock grinding to a halt.

He saw everything. Fully. Not insolate pieces, but threads in a cosmic tapestry. He saw the boy and the man and the veil of fear both had worn about their faces, so thick the great truth had stayed obscured.

The Forgotten One began to cry, though up here, floating, his eyes stretched in all directions, so that it was the world that cried, the world that floated. Everything was his. And yet he’d squandered it.

Not until this moment did he remember crouching behind an abandoned car, weeping at the approaching engine, for his mother, his father, his choices. Not until this now did he see the boy and man briefly touch fingers before he jumped below the moving truck.

***

He gasped awake. Tears of blood clouded his eyes. The pain was beyond him, beyond anything, and yet it was everything, not apart, but a part. He breathed every fiery needle into the lungs quivering beneath his splintered ribs.

“It hurts,” he clenched his shattered teeth. “It hurts.”

“Pain is the admission price, my friend.” It was the same voice he’d heard above the static of that other place.

The Forgotten One looked up, though in place of the nurse’s face, he saw fields of flowing grass and strong wind and a sun forever shining. He saw the boy running with both arms out to feel the stalks strike at his palms. 

“What are you?” he coughed. “Who are you?”

“I am you. And you are me. Is it not that simple?” The bright-faced stranger motioned to the room, “This is all a dance. Nothing more. The music plays and we move; sometimes for so long that we forget we are dancing. What’s important is that you understand.”

“But I don’t.” The Forgotten One groaned as he sat up. “I don’t understand.”

“Ah but you do. I see it in the fields of grass. The sun. They’ve never left. They wait for you now.”

“How do I get there? The grass… I miss the grass.”

“It takes only a realization,” the bright-face whispered.

“Of what?” Desperate now.

“That you, and I, and all of this … are absolutely perfect.”  

May 12th, 2014, Hermosa Beach, CA, 11:17 PM www.CarsonStandiferFiction.com       

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