(All That Happens) Before The Epilogue
Her last dream, she remembers, was a lavender field and a cinnamon sunset. One year ago. But she has had enough therapy sessions to know that landscape could be a wish and not a dream. She has wished to be back in that place for two years now.
She has not looked at herself in a mirror in the dark or she would see the scar over her heart-ragged and fatal. Seeing the faint unglow of the scar might make her remember what happened in that last dream. Then she could save herself from what is coming.
There is a story being written all over the world. (No one is listening.) It is heavy and sharp, but coming out easy. Its shape seems different with each native language and personal taints of the tellers. Seems. It is the same story; every teller with a fragment. No single teller could finish alone. They are all recording furiously, ignoring work and meals and family and gunfire and storm. Most tellers are making the story in their sleep, faster than hand or keyboard or tape recorder or creative committee with dry erase marker board in a particularly “productive” afternoon session and the support of particularly rich producers (who all happen to be on the creative committee as well, though without ever having written a short story, or finished Huckleberry Finn in high school, or the mere reading experience to name Franz Kafka to save their good arm).
No one is more shocked by the story than the tellers. No one can see the end.
The pieces will be finished at one time. And the story will be the last story to come true.
For fiction will get life, and the life is dying in the tales now. This is why this has to be done.
The graduate student sat back from his desk a moment. It only took the space and time of that one single movement for his smile to die. He touched his head with his hands and felt for something, already weeping. His fingers found nothing but smooth skull. And he pushed away the short story draft tantrum, and took the next English 112 paper from the pile. In the first paragraph he circled “there” and wrote “their,” circled “it’s” and wrote “its,” and wrote “Run on” and “Sentence fragment.” The paper was triple spaced, with two inch margins.
He thought of something, and imagined writing it down. Like a small dream, the images of his pen moving, the few letters forming, the thought itself changing into a physical thing, existing in two dimensions at once—his mind and on the yellow sticky memo.
“Revenge makes the world go ‘round.”
He never wrote that story.
There is one animal who knows the meaning of wish. There is one animal whose beliefs can alter reality. The owl has been beseeched and feared as an omen of destiny and doom; a bird that has grown into legend as a watcher and a symbol of monumental changes in history. Some or all of these is true at different times, and so there is nothing the owl cannot do. Except laugh. Owls are changing the world daily, at whim. And we cannot notice. They cannot laugh, and so they hate us for what we can do. They cannot laugh, not even in dreams. They cannot change their own dreams. They are glaring, hating, changing us.
They are at quiet war.
They love us. Their word for love is hate.
No one makes these rules.
There is a man who cannot forgive. He has never raised his voice to anyone in his entire career, and is a very reserved character (note the use of this word instead of the word “person”). He has worked at thousands of jobs and is, oddly enough, not forgotten by co-workers—even years after having moved on. People remember his full name, his face and body shape, though there is nothing extraordinary or in the least bit memorable about his presence—physical or otherwise. He had some odd habits, which are recorded here, but go unremembered by his peers. There was the way he used to sit alone in the corner of the break room, eating only carrot sticks for lunch. No one seemed to notice he always used the stairwell, never the elevator. If asked, no one would remember his limp handshake, the thickness of his glasses, or his absent-minded habit of a half-zipped fly. He was, we are allowed to say too, very reserved. Even though he could engage in a minimal amount of comfortable small talk at the company parties, no one remembers him for the odd nasal (yet melodic,) oboe tone of his delivery. No one can say why they remember him, though they can picture him exactly, even in the most vapid, selfish and/or egotistic of minds.
