THE WAR YEARS
Prologue.
The War Years were weeks on end of challenge and response. Civilisation ever progresses through such series of challenges and responses. Many feel they want to forget those weeks on end, leading to months slipping into months, years fighting back the years … until we or they or you could gather in the harvest of the present – as days topple into the future, we hope, interminably. Death is the only battle the years cannot join. But between who and who?
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“Hey!” shouts Tom, in one such challenge to the day.
The day did not respond. The day was fighting back the tears.
Silence stared cruelly from the mirror straight into his cold eyes. Tom was 80 odd. An even number, a round number. Years that had come full circle and met head on. He suddenly saw the warmth of the child in the eyes looking back at him. Rita had left him at the age of 70, his age of 70. Her round of years had misjudged the pitch and she had never reached last base, after swinging the bat at a seemingly empty ball. The true ball had indeed made a ricochet with a tree and ended up in the nettles, full solid foul. The flowers the nettles hid were its nest for a million nights to come, or were they the ghosts of flowers re-seeding the past with mulch? Meantime the future grew drier and drier. Arid shades that shifted above the grave that Tom never visited.
“What’s up?” Tom rejoined the battle with silence. He recalled the war years, the blitz bombers and the wayward doodlebugs. He’d been a child then, one eager to tap the novelty of Air Raids and Rations. His own grandfather was the mirror image of Tom today. Tom today. That was a name to conjure with. Tom Then was just a thumbprint on a window pane soon to be shattered by shrapnel, as Tom and his cousins used the Andersen Shelter as a focal point in their games of hide and seek. Tom Will Be melted in the heat of sunspots that rained down instead of bombs. The years were struggling against the global warming of newer, brasher years; scorched acres of time that relished the sandstorms which engendered them. Those pepperings of stingbombs from air’s last base.
Meantime, Tom listened out for Rita’s response. Greenless mean time.
Tom’s pasty yellow face was plastered to the glass like a poster advertising illness as a way of avoiding conscription. He pointed his finger. Tom Today was again Tom Then. The future needs you.
One cousin they had never found. Counted to one million, and then the others scattered off to search in tree and town and country and sea. Perhaps the cousin had never existed in the first place. A shade herself scuttling to hide in whatever shelter could be provided against time’s stuttering bombardment. Counted to one million years. “I’m coming, I’m coming, ready or not…”
Rita hid, she thought, in the undergrowth. But it was only thought, after all. She was merely a stitched globe with porous stuffing. The game was over. No mirrors are spherical on the outside. But if a mirror is spherical on the inside, the reflected image it throws can ricochet for a tandem of eternities.
“Let me catch you up!” screamed Tom Today.
But he never could. Tom Then ever heading towards last base, blindfold’s last run. Pin the tail on the Donkey’s Years…
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Epilogue.
Sadly there is none.
