Forty-one Years Ago -- Flash Fiction

image from Pond5

I knew this morning when I woke up. I understood. Forty-one years ago the world came to be when I held up my hand and blocked the sun. It disappeared. For that moment, the sun didn't exist. That was my first memory. Before that moment of knowing, nothing existed.

I've been told or I've read that the world is billions of years old. Or 6,000 years. Some say we landed men on the moon and there was a great earth quake in San Francisco more than a hundred years ago. I've seen both events or representations of them on TV. And I've seen planes fly into the World Trade Center buildings many times, maybe hundreds of times, also on TV.

I cannot, from my own experience, say that any of that is real. But I can say, from that moment of knowing forty-one years ago to this morning, the world  is real. Because I was there then, and I am here now.

When Grandpa was alive, I watched Matt Dillon shoot a new bad guy at the end of every Gunsmoke rerun. Somewhere along the line, I understood that Matt Dillon wasn't real and didn't really shoot those men.

I did, however, believe the things that knowledgeable people told me. Or that they wrote in books or video-documented. Their reasoning seemed sound. It gave me something to believe. To understand how things worked, how they got here. Why I was here. What the point of my being must be.

I would grow up, get married, have babies, raise those children, become a grandmother, and always learn. Become who I was meant to be. Learn what was real.


Charlie sprang full grown and twenty-six years old when I met him. Though a man, my own Athena. wore full armor -- a three-piece suit, a striped tie, and nice leather shoes. He came to my booth at the Downtown Art Festival. Before that, he did not exist. Not as a baby or teenager. Not even the night before that morning. But I saw him every morning for the next ten days of the art show.

Our nods became hellos and then lunches. When he laughed, he'd throw his head back and laugh out loud. His laugh attracted attention and made people smile. When he told me things, he made me see them as he described them. Sometimes I saw them before he described them.

He looked at me when he listened to me talk. He knew the stories I painted without me having to explain them. Why my skies were yellow ocher, trees had faces, and why snow flakes fell in the desert.

But I know now, that none of that existed when we were not together. He was only the bits and snatches that occurred when we were together.

At night as he slept beside me, he was real while I listened to him breathe. But when I slept, he ceased to exist. I would wake, joyous to find him there. Real again.

He gave me two babies. Now that I think about them, I understand how real they were at first when they were always with me. Then they became strobe light flashes. Eager faces anticipating a cookie, a first date, a graduation, a baby of their own. Or the light shown for a moment on broken hearted tragedy. A dropped ice cream cone, a lost love, a failed campaign.

Sometimes when I see them now and they are again real for the moment, I wonder who they've become, who I've become.

I went to bed last night. I didn't hear Charlie's breathing. I knew when I woke this morning that he wouldn't be there.

I thought about the world. What I know first-hand about it and when, I know for a fact, it came to be. Forty-one years ago when I held up my hand and blocked the sun.

Light filtered between the blinds. The dog wanted out. The children, now no longer children, would be here at 10:00 to help make arrangements.

The world still exists. It is real. At least for a while longer.