by Axel Martens
“Where does time go?” Lucas asked, his flax blonde hair sticking up in all directions after the mother had given him a haircut. The YouTube video had made it look so easy. Still, summer break just started. His hair would grow back by September.
“Time doesn’t go; it flows,” his older sister corrected. She liked doing that. Looking up from her sudoku, Margret pushed her glasses up her nose and surveyed the effect of her eleven-year-old wisdom.
“OK, where does it flow then?” Lucas asked. He didn’t care about syntax. He wanted the truth. “Is there an ocean of time?” Lucas knew all rivers flowed into the ocean. He liked the sea. The family had been to Barbados during Spring break, where Lucas snorkeled with colorful fish. Were there fish in the time ocean? Did they look like clocks?
“Time flows into eternity,” the father said, chewing on the stem of his tobacco pipe. There was no tobacco in the pipe, of course. He had given up smoking years ago. For his health, he said. On his wife’s orders, said everyone else. Still, reading the Sunday papers wasn’t the same without the pipe in his mouth.
“And where is eternity?” If every answer created new questions, Lucas would never know the whole truth.
“In my time…,” Grandfather started but coughed and forgot what he wanted to say. The mother entered with a basket of laundered socks.
“I wish I had more time,” she said. “Maggie, can you fold these socks?”
“I’m busy, Mom.”
“That’s fine. You can stay busy. Just with something else. For instance … these socks?”
“Mom,” the girl sat upright, putting her hands on her hips. “There is only so much time. I can either train my brain or my sock-folding skills. A trained brain will help me become a famous scientist one day. What benefit does sock folding provide?”
“Interesting you should mention limited time,” the mother replied, a mischievous grin on her face. “I can fold the socks myself. But then all the time will be gone, and I couldn’t bake cupcakes for your garden party tomorrow.”
“Gone?” Lucas asked. “I thought it would flow. And anyhow. Where will it be?” Everybody ignored him.
The cat entered. Lucifer slunk between the multitude of legs, bottlebrush tail up in the air. Some belonged to people, and some to furniture. Yet their owners seemed equally intelligent, in Lucifer’s opinion. He could have explained it all—the whole mystery that lay at the heart of the religious war between space-time string theory fanatics and the heretics of the quantum loop gravity school. Neither was right, of course, but why should Lucifer deign to correct them. After all, humans gave him food regardless.
“Does anybody knows anything?” Lucas got frustrated. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?” the father asked, distracted. Bonds had fallen again, and parliament argued about raising the retirement age. They would never agree on anything. What a waste of time.
“THE TIME!” Lucas couldn’t believe these people. “WHERE DOES IT GO?”
Grandmother knelt beside him and placed a bowl of strawberries in front of him, freshly picked from the garden.
“Every moment of time is like a strawberry. Some are sweet, and some are sour. Some are big and important, and some are small and special. Some are even hollow or rotten, but most of them are fine. They lie before you, and one by one, they disappear. All that is left are the memories. You never know how many there are. All you can do is savor the sweet ones, forget the sour ones, and enjoy the excitement of what will come next.” She brushed his hair. “It is good to ask questions. How else will you learn? But if you ask me, I don’t know if it makes a difference where time comes from or where it goes. What matters is what you do with it when it’s here.”
© 2023 Axel Martens All rights reserved.
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