Midnight with no beginning

flash fiction

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“Happy birthday,” I whisper with sour morning breath into the only sheets I’ll ever know. This is how it is now. Each fabrication of morning comes with the forced reminder of displacement from a time when a distant place held me. Death without the dying. Grief in relentless, nauseating motion. Midnight with no beginning, middle or end. All the time in the world and I still can’t keep up. Can’t figure where I’m supposed to be in the process. Duty triumphs feeling.

I wriggle out of bed like a worm struggling through the crust of the earth and put on the same beige jumpsuit I wore yesterday and the day before that. We call it a uniform. The bed stays unmade. I can’t bring myself to call it mine.

Down the dim corridor the walls seem to shiver and hum with some ambience of their own making. The recessed lighting is soft, the air spilling from each vent cold and sterile. The pockets of my jumpsuit sink so deep, I tease the internal fraying hems and imagine making a new life in the fabric cavern. It’s easier than you might think, to leave everything behind and be reborn. It’s just that the old life still follows you into the next. They tell you that it will but it’s best not to believe it until it’s too late to change your mind.

In the common room Julia is at her makeshift pew beneath her makeshift cross, her thin lips moving silently with the banner of words that must be scrawling past her mind’s eye. I asked her once if she thought God could hear her anywhere, no matter how far and removed. She smiled with her gappy teeth like I was a child asking a child’s question. “Prayers do not need to be heard,” she said. “Just made.” She’s only five or six years older than myself but she makes me feel sometimes so stupid and lost. I prefer when it’s me and Javi and our cordial, if uncomfortable silence. But he’s on ice today, so today Julia will make me a child again.

I lean against the kitchenette’s tiny counter chewing chunks off a dry granola bar while she goes about her prayer and when she’s done she signs the cross on her chest and stands, looking as though the holy ghost has passed through her and left a tiny kiss on her heart.

“Good morning,” she says in her sharp Slavic accent. I only nod. It’s nighttime, always nighttime but no one likes to acknowledge that. Structure is sanity, so they told us.

Julia mixes some pale oats with pale water in a shallow bowl. She sits at the little table and eats with a dreamy satisfaction, as if she’s been looking forward to this tasteless confection her entire life. We are very different people. She’s scraped her bowl clean before I can even finish my sad lump of protein. Her eyes look me up and down so sadly. I can tell she’s been praying for me.

“Who are you missing today?” she asks.

I utter an indignant little puff of breath through my nose. “Cigarettes,” I reply.

“I did not take you for smoker.”

I shrug. “I’ve only smoked maybe one pack in my whole life. I think it’s, like, uh, you only miss what you can’t have. Don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Joni Mitchell. That sort of deal.”

She takes her bowl to the sink and rinses it under a measly sputtering of water. Without another word she takes leave from the room and I know I am not holy because I can feel God leave the room with her. When she comes back a few moments later with a bruised pack of yellow American Spirits in hand, I start to wonder if she is God and has been the whole time.

“This can’t be allowed,” I say but even I can hear the weakness in my own resolve.

We sit on the floor passing one cigarette back and forth, gingerly, as though it might explode if we were to drop it. Already I am dreaming of those eleven other cigarettes snuggled in their carton and when I might get to poison myself with one again. Julia seems to see this logic as it fills my lungs.

“You go back to sleep tonight,” she says.

Tonight, today, yesterday, one hundred years from now, a billion brilliant mornings, all the same somehow. Yet it’s all changing still, just beyond the scope of my two eyes. The smoke dissipates so I breathe in and make more.

“Will you miss me?” I ask.

“Mmm,” she wonders aloud. “No. You are one person I do not have to miss.”

“It’s the opposite for me. I miss Javi when he’s asleep, I guess because I know he’ll get back up eventually. Missing anyone else is, I don’t know, too much. What’s the point?”

Julia tilts her head. I am a curiosity to her. “It is not about any point to me. The, the–what is it people say? Longing? The longing is not a choice or some sort of equation with simple answer. It is feeling. Cannot be chosen, yes?”

“It can be,” I say. “It just hurts to choose it is all.”

“Hurts either way, does it not?”

I suck on the cigarette longer than I should just to prove a point I’ve already made. It’s little more than a glittering nub when I hand it back to her. She takes one final drag then stubs it out in the bowl. It’s been something like fifty linear years since the last time this young body smoked a cigarette and the nicotine puts me on a sickly little cloud of memory. Breath condensing to vapor in the night air, fingers trading warmth with mine, ears cotton-stuffed from music played loud and lively. That night never ends in my head. I won’t allow it.

“It’s his birthday,” I say. “I mean, that is if we’re keeping track of time the right way. If time can even be kept out here.”

An uncharacteristic smile folds Julia’s lips over her gappy teeth. She says, “Structure is sanity.”

I resist the laughter but it kicks up like a cloud of dust anyway. Julia laughs with me, miles and miles into this endless night.

“How old?” she asks once we’ve stilled and gone solemn.

“He would be 74,” I say. “That is if he’s even still, you know…”

Julia is thoughtful. I wonder if she’s spoken to God about this, how we’ve played with time and made it stretch around us so unnaturally. It strikes me as the sort of thing God would take like spit hurled in His faceless face. Even I find it somehow insulting, an affront to the one temporally contained life I was given. What is life if not lived in a straight, unbroken line?

I watch as Julia picks a gray corner of the room and stares through it as though it’s an open window with drifting lace curtains and rolling green hills beyond, the bright white sun making routine of all our days forever.

“My daughter was six when we left. She was sick, very sick since she was baby. It is most likely she’s been gone for some time. But I pray anyway that she is healthy and living beautiful life with someone to love and passion beyond surviving one more day. Maybe she is dead. Maybe her body got strong and tough and kicked out sickness. Maybe her life is long but bad and painful.” Julia shrugs. “I don’t know. It does not help to wonder. Hurts either way, yes? Alive or dead, it does not change how I miss her.” She thumps her fist against her heart and I can almost hear it, the echoing thump in her chest, the humanity ringing out across untraversed darkness.

“We have to remember,” Julia says, pulling back through the false window and returning to me, on the floor, with my hands listless for another’s in my lap. “We have to show them when we arrive, what kind of creatures we are. Where we come from. Who we loved. What made lives worth living. It is terrible sacrifice we made for this. But we are laying path for many beautiful lives in future that is impossible to comprehend, even as we are moving toward it, little by little. So we hold onto our love as every other thing falls away. It travels with us, yes?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Fuck. It sure does.” The tears plumping at the corners of my eyes are quickly snubbed with the tough heel of my palm.

Julia smiles and the gaps in her teeth show me whole histories of people come before her and whole futures altered by her very presence in transit. We are so significantly insignificant.

“Let’s get to work,” she says and helps me to my feet.

In our matching uniforms, I follow Julia’s steady gait down the dim and cool corridors which will house us for a few hundred more linear years. On my left the sturdy steel wall gives way to sturdy glass, one of only three windows gracing the whole behemoth structure. Outside is midnight with no beginning, middle or end. Only the steady onward crawl toward inevitable collapse, like everything else. Pure blackness broken up only by impossible balls of distant light winking, birthing, dying in all directions. Occasional bursts of understanding in what is otherwise a long, slow death.

Somewhere very, very far off is a voice calling out to see who is there. We wake, we sleep, we wake again. We are on a long journey to answer the call. Say hello, and what now? I’ll tell these callers then, impossibly far from now, of the night he and I met, with the cold air and our hands first discovering one another, the laughter we made, the cigarette we shared and the thing we began. Then I’ll them the long but not long enough middle. And then I’ll tell the end.

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thanks for reading. stick around a while?

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