“It started, as usual, with a vague feeling of remembering: me, grass, summertime. Then came the youthful Memory Body, gradually occupying the Randomly Recalled Iconic Space.” Fiction by George Saunders.
“What’s that, David?” Mom yelled from upstairs. “Geez, say goodbye, then come up. It’s not like he’s a real horse, goof.”. In the here and now. In the current sadness. Heartsick that Mr. Petey would have to live out the rest of his life in this basement, unridden among the relics. I would never forget him, I assured him. I would be right upstairs if he ever needed me. He should just whinny.Baby toy? he thought. No, I get it, pard, he thought back. Look, you’d best mosey along.
I took a sip of the Coke, then conveyed to them as much as I could: Something was amiss. This immersion had not been tightly time-confined within the usual continuous one-hour window. Not at all. Rather, I had started at thirteen, then leapt backward into a noncontiguous time interval some seven years earlier, and was, hence, six, there at the end, six years old.“So that’s good, right?” Mrs. Dwyer said to Horace.
And yet, when I was growing up out there, on what was known, geologically, as the Hunter Uplift, no neighbor within thirty miles, Coke seemed a harbinger of a dazzling new space-age life, a life less tedious and agricultural. Because forbidden, Coke was alluring. Coke, back then, seemed like something a young person might need to know a little something about. If a Coke was on the blue table, I’d reach up, palm the can, pretending to be a grownup about to pick it up.
It wasn’t like her to just disappear. Or was it? I actually wasn’t sure. It hadn’t been like her as a child. But, in terms of what she was like later? I was drawing a bit of a blank. Which was odd. To not know where one’s sister was? Or what she had been like, after a certain point?“Unfortunately, no one knows,” said Mrs. Dwyer. “She just up and vanished one day. A mother of four. Left a note but no forwarding address.
“I was so lonely after Mr. Dwyer passed,” Mrs. Dwyer said. “I thought my life was over. And now, such bounty.”
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