Wider

The car bears down on me, and my life, as they say, flashes before my eyes. It does not pass by in linear order. I am surprised by this but should not be. After all, the brain folds memories in mismatched yarn rather than stringing them along a chronological wire. I cannot tell which of my recollections comes earliest. Below a certain age, they twist as amorphous, asynchronous threads. And that is their natural state; time is an unwanted knot in thought, chiseled tally marks in supple cerebral walls. It unravels now.

See, I walk alongside passing cars rather than standing paralyzed before one. The bottom of the paper bag tears, the weight on my right arm lessens, and my groceries plummet to the sidewalk where they perform a brief drum solo. Cans scatter, fruits smoosh, and whites leak from a crumpled egg carton. I crouch to salvage what I can as passersby veer around me, polite enough to avert their eyes from my embarrassing distress. Except for one child, thin and wide-mouthed, wearing a dirty baseball uniform, who stops to stare at the frazzled adult struggling, and I wither beneath his gaze.

I hold my father’s weathered hands as they convulse. Hours slip by and the spasms come and go, but he does not seem to recognize me during this visit. An aide comes with his medicine and dinner, and I prepare to leave rather than see another painstaking, spoon-fed meal. Perhaps a glimmer of familiarity resurfaces in my father’s mind, since as I near the doorway, he croaks, “the boy, the boy comes…,” crumbs already beginning to spread over his wrinkled undershirt. I choose to interpret this as a reference to seeing his son. I take what I can. On my way out through the hospital’s sterile waiting room, I spot a child’s drawing recently pinned to the wall. A doodle of a small, smiling stick-figure waving at himself in a golden mirror. I feel my age.

I swing, but the ball hurtles by and crunches into the catcher’s glove for the third time. Out, but I am secretly content as I shuffle my way to the Little League dugout, the sun setting behind me in the outfield. It goes against the spirit of the game, but I enjoy the feeling of the bat arcing, uninterrupted, from my lengthening arms more than the sickening lurch of the wood colliding with the ball, forces contesting for dominance, a crack that signals a desperate sprint to round the bases as my lungs labor for air. I would have quit baseball last year, but I could tell that my father enjoyed watching me play, seeing his son partake in the typical American childhood instead of the shadows and chants and incense of his own youth, the occult obsessions of my grandfather. I glance over to him and Mom in the crowd and spot, a little ways to their right, that thin, wide-mouthed child wearing his grimy baseball jersey. Even from a distance, he resembles me, but he is a few years too young to be part of the team, so he either came to watch or to wait for the field to free up.

But that isn’t right. I saw that child during my memory of spilled groceries, when I was in my twenties, living in Seattle, and hopelessly in love with Eleanor Martins ‒ not a pre-teen on the baseball field. Except…

A fog in the winter air, my breath wraps around my face as I storm out of the office. There are too many thoughts thrashing in my head ‒ retorts surfacing minutes too late, suspicions circling with jagged teeth, violent fantasies pulling me under. Hadn’t I done everything right? And for it all to end like that. I pull my overcoat around my shoulders, and for just a moment, wind howling around me, the sky swirling with gray clouds, I imagine myself like my grandfather, dark and haughty in my raiments, claiming mastery of secret powers. But, in the end, my grandfather was just a charlatan, preying off his customer’s delusions of magic to win petty cash. And I am just a young man in a cold city, now out of work, and in my haste, I almost bowl over a thin, wide-mouthed child making his way to a ball game in the opposite direction.

I graduate from college tomorrow. Maybe technically today? By now, midnight has likely come and gone. Rather than check the clock, I continue to hold my eyes shut, and sleep continues to elude me. I want to rest well tonight, to face the morning’s emotional tolls and early convocation with full wakefulness. But there is too much anticipation. I will see all my friends for the last time before we head off towards our respective jobs and graduate schools. I will end four years of study and growth. I will leave for a distant city where I barely know anyone ‒ just an acquaintance of a friend named Eleanor Martins who I texted when finding an apartment. How can I sleep? I can almost feel my future stretching out before me. Just as I feel the small hands of a child ruffling through my hair. I jerk upright as the thought registers, but I am alone in the darkness of my dorm room. For a second, I imagine I see the faint after-image of a wide-mouthed smile. My brain must have been closer to sleep than I realized.

My parents and my grandfather discuss weighty adult matters, so I sneak away to play among the store’s ornate furnishings. My dad hates visiting my grandfather’s magic shop, calls him a huckster and a fraud in his bitter moments, but I have always wanted to explore its secrets. Usually, my grandfather serves as austere guardian over the artifacts, lecturing about the dangers of a child roaming near caged demonic forces, but he is too absorbed in discussion to notice my actions. Seizing the opportunity, I sneak into his study. Countless scrolls, dowsing rods, amulets, and other trinkets catch my eye. But curiosity draws me onward. I notice a drape covering the study’s back wall, and when I poke my head behind it, I find that it covers the entrance to a second, inner room, plain and poorly lit. Other than a golden mirror adorning one wall, its only contents are a stand with a crystal ball resting on top. I venture closer to the pedestal and see mists swirling, trapped within the surface of the orb. Intrigued, I reach up to remove it from the stand, to examine the dancing forms, but the ball slips out of my fingers and smashes against the floor. Glass sprays out, the mists flow free, and a tingling laughter fills my ears. I gasp at my misfortune, but worse is yet to come. Out of the corner of my eye, the mirror licks up the floating mists, and in its depths, my reflection begins to shudder. And then, for the first time, it looks around. My own head is still ‒ the movement independent. On that day, I am thin and wearing a baseball jersey, stained from my earlier game. My parents, hearing the shatter, call for me, so, with a child’s confusion and fear, I wave at my newborn, childish reflection before running to them, and, in the golden mirror, it waves back and smiles.

The car tosses my body like a ragdoll. Tires screech to a halt as I lie in the road, my head turned to its side, my senses growing dim. With all these memories, I cannot help but focus on how they could have gone differently. Spread across the years, it is easy to overlook certain patterns, but lined up like that, well, it is hard not to notice. How easily recollection shifts to regret. My groceries pirouette on the sidewalk, but instead of looking away, the woman passing by stops to help me gather them up, we chat, and we spend the rest of our lives together. My father manages to tell me that he loves me through his illness. I swing my bat, the ball soars away, and I round the bases. I keep my job on that cold winter day. I never text Eleanor Martins, never break my heart. I catch that crystal ball before it shatters on my grandfather’s floor, changing my fate so that now, lying in the road, I end up seeing something, anything, other than that thin, child-doppelgänger approaching, wide mouth growing wider, wider, wider.