The Days Go Ever On

The French woman came up to me outside of the church. I didn’t know she was French, not yet, or that we were connected, but I suppose she did. She took my hand, and I looked up. The French woman was a full six inches taller than me, and she was beautiful. She pulled me close, and I let her.

“I wonder what I can do to help you. You have the saddest eyes,” she said. It took me a moment to sort out the words from her accent.

“You’re here now.” My voice sounded strange to me. This happened before, another time, exactly like this, I thought. No, not another time. Another now. I tried to shake the feeling.

“We’re here for each other.”

I closed my eyes. What I started seeing in my head was a field of bushes, hearty and evenly spread, pregnant with blueberries. Among the rows were smoking bits of metal, and I started to feel nauseous. As my mind’s eye moved through the field, the bushes became less frequent, and the ones that remained were filled with dead, white leaves. The ground was blackening and sloping downward. I knew what I’d find if we kept going, if we came to the crater. I opened my eyes.

“I was there,” she said. She didn’t have to – I understood that the images had been hers. She took a long red fingernail and put it under my chin. I wanted to speak, but my throat had closed up.

“Tell me, saddest eyes, tell me your story,”

My story.

I saw again all of the children who wouldn’t be coming back. Jessica, a bright young girl with braces and an easy smile. Damon, a troublemaker who’d always worn his baseball hat sideways. Steven, with thick glasses and cargo pants. Kendra, a pom-pon princess who

pulled good grades. Robbie, who always wore the same white t-shirt, khaki shorts, and flip flops combination year round. The rest of the twenty-seven kids. The five parents who’d chaperoned, never making it to Washington. It was my trip, a journey to the Smithsonian I’d lobbied for. Field trips that included air travel were hard to come by, but I’d gotten it for them. Three days before it happened I came down with a strain of flu that the media had been railing against for more than a month, and had to pull out of the trip. It’s why I’m still here and not a victim of that same tornado, a quickly-forming pillar of low pressure that had baffled every CNN meteorologist.

They were just miles from the runway, still ascending.

I hadn’t slept at all for days after, had baked my sheets in sweat as I imagined the chaos within the cabin, the expressions on my students’ faces curdling from uneasiness into complete mind-blowing panic. The flight attendants sprinting down the aisles, the screams. I thought about my permission slips, the ones each parent had signed and paper-clipped twenties to. Each child’s very own final resting place among the bushes at the Jameson Blueberry Farm in Hemlock, paid for in cash.

The way the other teachers had looked at me at the funeral, some mixture of pity and anger. Parents didn’t acknowledge my existence. I’d killed their kids. I didn’t know what to do. Principal Doback pulled me aside and told me to stay home, even after the week of mourning was over. I didn’t have a class to teach anymore. So I buried myself under my roof. Dodged what seemed like every newspaper and radio station and television network in the country looking for react quotes and a feature piece on the lucky son-of-a-bitch who cheated death and found himself with the biggest pile of survivor’s guilt known to the modern media. One station even wanted to interview me about my recovery from Deer Flu. I unplugged my phone, turned off my cell, and did my best to keep breathing.

“Yes,” she said. I lifted my head from the soft cradle of her breasts, and saw the wetness I’d left. “Yes,” she said again, “You’re the one I’ve been looking for.”

@2 years ago