By Daniel DeRock
Yesterday you were a child, the scope of the world impossible, the stretch of a century boundless. You caught tadpoles in rain puddles.
Now, you’re here, on a part of the globe that you don’t yet call home.
“Breathe deep, in and out, steady.” The anesthesiologist covers your mouth and nose with a mask. “Sweet dreams,” he says. Maybe. Your grip on the language is loose. Your mind is loose, your selfhood loosening.
Sleeping gas tastes like super glue. Time pauses, a pause presses heavy on your vulnerable body. First dark, then nothing.
“Hello.” The surgeon leans over you, haloed in fluorescence. Her words are just shapes in the air. You loosely interpret the language you still haven’t grasped. “You’ve been asleep for an hour, subjectively.”
Subjectively?
“For you, an hour has passed. On Earth, more than six thousand years.”
The surgeon smiles, but not in a way that suggests she’s joking. You remember the anesthesiologist put a mask on your face. Sleeping gas tasted like super glue, smoked out your caves, your ravines. You’re waking now from hypersleep, how many lightyears away, through how many wormholes.
“Shall I switch to English?” the surgeon asks.
You nod.
“Everything went good. You may feel a bit sore.”
You’re sore where they cut you open and took stuff out and moved stuff around. You’re on Earth and an hour has passed. You’re soft and radiant, drenched in narcotics.
When a nurse asks what kind of popsicle you want, you laugh. You laugh and laugh. The nurse doesn’t laugh. She wants you to choose between cherry and lime. You wait for the punchline, but she’s straight faced, like she’s not aware of how minor gods reveal their tricks.
“Does the hospital have a time specialist?” you ask. Because you don’t have enough information to make this kind of choice.
“I’m sorry?”
“Someone who knows about time.” How it folds and collapses, shutters and cycles. Splinters into cherry timelines, lime timelines. Someone who understands that no decision is small, no matter how much we deceive ourselves. No matter how flippantly we choose.
The nurse brings you cherry. After all, maybe it’s better to have choices ripped from your hands.
“It feels so weird,” you say.
The nurse laughs, but still she doesn’t get it. Not really. If she does, she won’t let you know it.
You get it, though. You learned the truth about time when you stood outside of it. Now angels crash through the hospital rooftop and beg you to look them in their scared black eyes.
You made a choice decades ago, chose mint chip or cookie dough. You followed a small cat behind a garage in the gloaming or you didn’t. You said yes to love or you cowered. You—a weeping baby—entered the world sticky and fragile. Your first thoughts were immediate, as in set before the soul without mediation, known without words to transmute their meanings. You thought,
Here is the pulse of the world, and already it’s weakening.
You thought,
Here is the light that will keep me alive, and already it’s fading.
Daniel DeRock is a writer from the U.S. living in the Netherlands. His fiction has appeared, among other outlets, in Pithead Chapel, Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, and Ligeia Magazine. He is the fiction editor for Reservoir Road Literary Review, co-founder and fiction editor of Icebreakers Lit, and associate fiction editor for Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine.
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