by Jeremy Finn
Tears continued to pour down her cheeks as she wound through the streets. There were so many children. Could she collect them all? And where was she going to bring them? How far would she need to go to bring them to a spot where the giant wave would not eventually reach them?
An ancient pagoda caught her eye as she rounded a turn. It was sitting atop a small hill at the edge of the city. Due to its value as an ancient treasure, the city must have left the hill undeveloped. Trees dotted its slopes, but the top was grassy and bare around the pagoda. A dirt road wound up to the peak with a small parking lot near the building. She found her way to the base of the hill and climbed it quickly. Some people were clambering up the slope, but few had made it to the top. The natural disaster must have been unanticipated and quite a surprise this early in the morning.
Ashley stopped in the parking lot and gently pulled the five children she collected out and laid them on the grass. They looked disturbing with arms and legs jutting out at awkward angles and expressions of horror on their faces, but they would be safe here.
She made a few more trips, but was exhausted since she had effectively stayed awake for over twenty-four hours. So, she collapsed on the grass near the ranks of running children and toddlers with arms stretched out grasping at the air.
She slept surprisingly well due to her exhaustion and woke to the same sliver of red sun emerging eternally over the ocean beyond. This cycle continued for weeks and then months. Ashley could not stop herself from working frantically to save the children in the doomed city below. She worked to the verge of exhaustion, but discovered some ways of improving her efforts. On one of her trips, she noticed a man in the process of loading a small flatbed truck, something like a mini pickup, and realized she could fit more kids in the back of a vehicle like that. It increased her daily accumulation by nearly twice as much.
She began to run out of room on the hill with kids stacked like cordwood above the level where she expected the water might rise. So, Ashley began to look for other areas where the children would be safe. She found some tall buildings and a few other hills, but eventually the only elevated areas were outside the city and required more time to drive from the areas where people were in danger to the safe spots.
As she reached what she calculated to be her last month, she was not only physically exhausted, but emotionally drained as well. She had to make so many hard choices, like leaving babies since they would probably not fare well stranded on a hill or high in a building without any adults around. She no longer had thoughts of suicide, though. She knew she was saving lives. She had been given an opportunity and a blessing, not for herself, but for all those she could help.
Soon she knew her last day was coming, when exactly she could not be sure. She had no way of precisely counting the days, but she had counted her long periods of sleep and they were reaching over three hundred and fifty. After waking to the soft red glow of the eternal morning, she rolled into the city again in her perpetual cycle of harvesting children. Since she knew her time was nearly up, she felt it might be best to gather kids from the edge of the tsunami. An hour or so of combing the water's edge yielded a full truck bed of kids, so she wound her way through a narrow alley trying to find a way to squeeze back out away from the wall that would at any moment come crashing down on the people and cars immobile around her. Just as she found a turn off the alleyway opposite the wave, a scene caught her eye. A boy of about eight years stood frozen in the middle of the road. He was staring down the alley toward a traditional tiled building at the end of the street. The building appeared to be a temple or something else of an antiquated but ornate design with wooden walls and a roof that sloped out and up to points at the corners. It was layered with rows of blue tiles and tiny images of iron beasts perched on the crests. In a big window facing the street on the second floor, an elderly bald man stood solemnly returning the boys gaze. He was dressed in a simple robe and seemed firm as an oak. Ashley suspected if time were to start again, the man would remain as rooted and stationary as he was right now. It was a curious sight, for some reason, as if she could sense the gravity of that frozen connection between the elder and the youth. Ashley stepped out of the truck and stared at them for a moment, trying to imagine what was occurring when the world stopped suddenly. Finally, she dismissed her daydreaming and grabbed the boy. She hauled him to the passenger side of the cab and threw him in. As she turned to drive away from the watery wall, she caught one final glimpse of the man in the window. The distance was considerable, but she felt she could nonetheless read the sorrow on the man's face.
Ashley reached the top of a hill quickly becoming immersed in children and offloaded her latest load. She pulled the boy out of the passenger seat last and laid him on the ground with his eyes, sending a mixture of yearning and panic, facing the sky. She walked around the front of the truck ready to search out another lot. When she grabbed the door to pull it open, though, her hand met no resistance and she flung her arm unintentionally to the left. It struck something hard and she heard glass shatter beside her. She staggered as her brain tried to catch up with her eyes. She was standing in her kitchen. She had knocked a glass off the counter. The microwave oven hummed as it heated her lasagna.
Ashley raised her eyes and looked out the window. The sun was setting in the west and dipping into the clouds. As she gazed into the glowing orb, she felt a jolt. Something touched her inside. It was a deep feeling she would never be able to put into words, almost like an understanding without understanding. And so she never did put it into words. She never told anyone about the miracle. Word spread about the strange occurrence in Japan, but it was eventually coined coincidence. People could not accept any other explanation. She never felt any pride. If anything, she felt guilty she did not do more. What else could she have used that precious time for? So, out of fear for being called crazy and a nagging sense of guilt, she never spoke of the time. She never shared with others the year that wasn't, though to her credit, she shared it with many.
Insight
Like many of my stories, the basis for this one comes from daydreaming. I often thought it would be great if I could freeze time at night during a busy week. My mother used to say such things too. Then I would be able to do everything I needed to do, get some good solid sleep and then have some fun with recreational activities before switching the clock back on to real life. What would I do if I did have more time than I could possibly need? Such questions inspired this story and I mixed in the recent tsunami in Japan and a memorable experience I had visually connecting with an old Buddhist monk from the window of his monastery when I was visiting on an academic outing. It seemed much passed without words in that brief but profound moment. Finally, the idea of this becoming a split story developed in my mind and then I thought it would be interesting to do two stories that converged. To make it more interesting, how about throw one at the beginning of the book and one at the end? So, there it is, and now the first story probably has a bit more depth for the reader too. At what point did you realize the connection?
