Loss: Tomorrow Was Yesterday • A Short Story.
ESTABLISHING SHOT:
A barren, featureless moorland. A strip of dawn’s light like a burning ribbon, a choker around the throat of the horizon. In the mid distance a hunkered cottage, single storey and sagging, weakly defended by a low dry-stone wall border, as if bracing itself for something it cannot withstand.
AERIAL TRACKING SHOT:
The camera drops from height, too silently to be benign. It glides toward the cottage with a slow, predatory certainty, the dwelling expanding to fill the 16:9 frame until…
SLOW FADE:
The cottage interior.
OPENING SEQUENCE:
Dimly lit and gloomy, the corners of the room cannot be seen, fading into lightless obscurity. Do the corners even exist? Or is it the room itself that dwindles at the perimeters, the warp and weft of reality worn thin and threadbare.
A rustic farmhouse kitchen, solid wooden dining table, utensils hanging, cast iron stove, but no one cooks here. No one eats here.
There is no plumbing, no well, no spring. No one drinks here.
There is no electricity, no heating, no fire. No one feels the cold here.
Piles upon piles of objects, mundane and fanciful, bloom teetering from every surface – matchboxes full of buttons, thimbles and bookmarks, milk teeth and pennies, pudding spoons and cotton buds, everything that you ever lost and will never find, all of it is here.
The walls are rendered with ten thousand semi-sentient clocks, exchanging cryptic Morse code messages that only the Deathwatch beetles can hear.
Somewhere in the cottage, something echoes, though nothing has moved and nothing has ever made a sound here.
The air is fusty and shriven within the stalled passage of this splinter of daybreak, an oscillating and infinite loop that describes the boundaries here.
I have always lived in this place. There is no before. There is no after. There is just this crystal interval, twinkling and spinning ad infinitum. The comfort of repetition and the security that nothing much of any real consequence ever changes here.
Wherever ‘here’ is.
And yet, somehow, suddenly, I am now outside. Or perhaps, not quite outside, more at the threshold. But nearer to the outside than I have ever been before. The Three Angels are departing. They have always existed here, with me. There was no before but now there seems to be the possibility of an after here.
The Three Angels cannot be witnessed directly, they must be glimpsed from the corner of the eye, at that periphery where they are merely vague and flimsy shapes with strobe light grace. But you know exactly how they appear without needing to look, don’t you? They keep the clocks honest here.
I have transgressed (my virtue recast as vice) but I do not know, nor am I permitted to know, and so I shall never know, what my offence was. The not knowing lingers along the Möbius strip of my imagination.
The Three Angels turn in unison, their thin smiles unreadable, before stepping, feet skimming above the dewy grass, through the gnarled gate…..
And in this moment, this stuttering, this replay, this summit becomes chasm.
“An empty midnight village dry winter street, flickers intermittently superimposed upon my vision, blue upon blue, burning bright cold, the pink-noise hiss of the wind in the bare tree branches, clattering and accusatory. Churchyard shrubs clinging to the consecrated and desiccated soil.
……..lamplight brittle, this potential is devoured by the same purgatorial frost gnawing through my implanted past.”
I was obediently contented in that moment, and now I exist in this disobedient moment, this new moment, this unmapped territory, the instant before it all evaporates. Caught in the glow of Heaven but knowing that it has been permanently denied. A vertiginous lurch of overdue consequence, dazed and clambering from the blunt force trauma of fortunes in collision, the wreckage of regrets.
Do I plead? To whom? For what? Either way, the decisions have already been made.
The Three Angels are paused, merciless, and I ask, aloud, above the clamour of the clocks:
"What happens next?"