Many Returns.

It’s my birthday in a few hours, I’ll be a hundred and seventy-five.

Something like that.

I can still walk, which is a blessing, and I can still juggle – not something people my age are known for.

I don’t fancy getting up on the unicycle much though, even if I have three of them in the cellar.

Anyone want one?

Age is a series of letting go and not doing things you once did.

I don’t eat raw Brazil nuts anymore.

Teeth.

And I don’t run like I used to.

Knees.

I bumped into Dennis a couple of days ago and it turned out we share a birthday.

“How long did it take you to find out?” My daughter asked him.

“A hundred and seventy-four years,” he replied. 
I’m a year older.

He doesn’t smoke anymore – I never have.

He doesn’t drink – I had just had a glass of red wine.

Or two.

We were sitting in the bar when he told me this and we spoke at length.

Which we hadn’t before.

The previous time we had the conversation went-

“My daughter told me you weren’t selling pizzas anymore.”

“She’s wrong.”

“I see.”

“Do you want one?”

“No.”

I stopped pizza years ago.

This time the conversation was different.

“I have a theory.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A lot of your life you think, I’m alive and living. But maybe one day you just know you’re not. That in fact you’re dying. I haven’t got there yet.”

“Yes, I used to think I was immortal and when I stopped thinking that, I thought I was auto-repairable. Now I know I’m not.”

Dennis has part of one finger missing.

Me, a toe.

Because he makes and sells pizzas all the kids said he had cut it making the pizzas and the bits were in the dough.

In fact, he lost in to a slammed car-door.

I lost mine to a lawnmower.

When I went to the hospital the doctor welcomed me with a – ‘Ah, first of the season.’

It was early Spring.

Today, it’s late winter.

It’s my birthday in a few hours.

I’ll be a hundred and seventy-five.

And celebrating.

 

 

 

A Further Small Part of Something Other.

Four people sit around the table, a table made of oak from another century.

A man, a woman, someone betwixt and Jack.

Jack self-identifies, he sees himself as himself, always has and is happy thus. He doesn't know about the others.

He also likes the table.

The woman is talking, Jack is listening but he is also running his hand along the edge of the wood.

He is thinking about the question the woman has asked, whether the most recent supreme-court ruling is an abomination or much to be expected.

He considers his own opinion on the subject, that an abomination is never less for being expected, and is about to offer this when his fingers feel a crack in the table edge. 

Distracted, he allows them to explore the opening and before long they feel the piece of paper hidden there, grip it excitedly and draw it out into the open for the first time in a hundred years.

The woman stops talking and glares, reasonably so since she has been chosen to lead the discussion.

The man coughs, he sounds nervous.

The betwixt looks quizzically as Jack carefully unfolds the manuscript, careful not to allow haste to crumble the words into dust.

“Go on then…,” the woman’s voice displays an uncharacteristic acceptance.

Jack looks up and meets her eyes.

Can ice-blue eyes blaze, he asks himself? Not for the first time he finds himself admiring her beauty and tries to dismiss the thought.

“We’re waiting.” Her voice echoes through the silent room. Cobwebs, in the highest corner, tremble. A spider scurries home.

“To whoms it may concern.” Jack begins. His voice reflects his own questioning of the surprising use of an s.

“As you read this, everything changes. Time will no longer proceed in a lineal fashion. Expect what once was, to be what will soon be.”

Jack looks up.

Everyone is watching him as if he were a conductor in the opera house about to signal to the lead violinist.

He feels sick.

He wants to vomit.

The room begins to spin in his vision.

He closes his eyes trying to stop it.

He blacks out and falls forward, his head hitting the table harder than it should.

A trickle of red blood seeps across the open page......

This extract was taken from A Small Part of Something Else 

by Al T Rego esquire.