Day 238 - Repeat Offenders - Chapter 11 - (1042 words)

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REPEAT OFFENDERS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 11

There was a slight breeze in between the trees, the clearing providing just enough space for the air to move a little quicker, eddy a little more, stir the leaves to lift slightly from the ground. There was still plenty of cover above so when you wanted to hide from the sun you could easily get enough shade to avoid any harshness the light provided. The sunlight flickered through that half covering canopy and the dappled lighting made the pleasant temperature match the mood lighting that nature provided.

Brian walked calmly through the clearing and stood in the sunlight, he could feel the warmth touching his skin, knew that even though he had only just walked out this time, the exposure to the sun from his last two or three trips to this place were adding up. Already he could feel the smarting, the reddening of skin on his forehead and forearms. He needed to get in the shade but all he wanted was the heat of the sun, he had been through this glade twice already and he knew where the sweet spot was in terms of when the sun and the breeze were at the peak of pleasantness. He was guaranteed a window of opportunity to enjoy the afternoon, to bask in the light and feel the heat.


The heat that both seared and sealed his skin from exposure to the radiation, no matter how he dealt with it. When he had frozen time, the first few exercises he had undertaken with the device, he had stretched an afternoon here by a full 90 minutes in the brightest and sunniest part of that afternoon. The breeze was arrested and there air completely still, in side the bubble there was nothing but photons moving, the wind from air pressure was being generated outside the field, and it made traversing the border, the barrier between now and nothing, impossible for anything except light itself. He had burned in that 90 minutes, standing there and thinking about the possibility of that machine he had wrought. What it could do for mankind, what it could do to help and change things for everyone. It was ground breaking and important, it was impossible and improbable but it had worked, worked better than he could ever have imagined.


He had a working version of the machine in the Barn, this farm an inherited and desolate landscape miles from the city. Here he was free to experiment with all that he could dream up, and if he miscalculated then the blow back was local, no collateral damage unless a truly catastrophic chain reaction was started. He never expected that there would be of course, but he took precautions just in case, that was the responsible thing to do.


His health had been bad this whole year, coughs and colds that never left, hung around for days that stacked up into the three digits. He was tired and he was weary, the weight of existence was heavy on him, like a coat made of wool in the summer sun. The last few weeks though had invigorated him and he was buoyed by the success of the machine, he had come to the farm that his grandparents had worked decades ago, the one his own parents willed to him at a much younger than expected age. His line was ending with him, he had no spouse and no desire for children, the only surviving child of an only child, he could see time slowing to a crawl and ending the lineage with him. He had distant cousins, but little contact with them, the cancer that killed both his father and father's father would likely have passed through to the next generation anyway.


What kind of man would knowingly bring a child forth with a greater than seventy percent chance of dying young, dying miserable as time wound down? He himself was already beyond the age that his father had lived to, and was nearing the age that his grandparents had lived through to. His grandmother died of a heart attack not long after loosing her husband, the stress of coping was too much for her and it all just seemed to wind down for her after he passed. His own mother had also died close to his father, but in her case it was an auto-mobile accident. She was well enough, she was sad and bereft, unsure what to do and a strong heart meant that the fate she had in mind, to keep family tradition alive, maybe just to establish one, was enough to drive her to drive her car into a tree.


The police had declared it an accident, they cited the blown tyre and the skid marks that were uncontrolled and randomly unlucky enough to careen straight into the tree and to knock her into a concussion from severe head trauma, one she never woke from. Brian knew, well he guessed since actual knowledge on the subject was unavailable and conjecture was really the only yardstick for what happened, that she drove in that direction, she spun out as hard as she could, popping the tyre in the process and pushing the wreck in the general direction of the hard wood post that the car would concertina around. She never woke, steadily grew worse in a coma until her body gave up the fight her spirit never took on willingly.


Brian did not begrudge his mother, she took the toad that worked for her, not the one which worked for her son. She took the path that fate and vanity had laid in front of her, giving her the option to jump down or be pushed into this.


Brian could feel her presence, though he knew it to be illusion and self deception, but ones that were acceptable to him. This was a matter of what was left, funerals and grieving after all have very little to do with the dead and are mostly about the living. She, his mother, could no foresee a place where the pain was not a dagger in her side, where catching the boat to the underworld was a boon and not a curse. She was Orpheus to Brian's father;s Euridices.