A Million More Tomorrows

Chapter 1

           

A Box Full of Cats
A.R. Goodheart

"We cannot manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as 'real' or 'only possible.'"

-          Erwin Schrödinger

Part I:

Five Days Left

CHAPTER 1

The body was spread across the edge of the road, a hand draped against the forehead, the legs ribboning balletically over one another, rain thrumming upon its curves and lengths. There was no spray or ebb of blood, save for a thimble's spatter on the forehead of no obvious origin. Paul Everett stood over it and pulled his left palm over his face, dragging wet skin over the bones beneath and drawing a sigh for the wrinkles and their increasing slack. A sallow film had become of integument. Chalk had replaced iron. There was a frailty to each contour now that he hated. Age, eroding into his features, had robbed him of vigour. Of sharpness of mind. It had reversed the swell of his chest from an ivory cage to a shrill mesh just as ruthlessly as it had dissolved the cartilage between his joints. The hide of his fingers resembled chalk rubbings on sticks and nothing more – nothing to denote a life lived in anything other than shallow bones. Though he was just about alive, which was more than could be said for the thing lying at his feet.

            He had moved towards the corpse in a circular path, sweeping around it as one would approach a dangerous animal – as though he were half expecting it to spring back to life. The dry thud and the cracking of windshield glass repeated on him, bouncing around the caverns of his mind and stirring a slight anger – an indifferent flavour of annoyance. So he did not arch down towards the man's neck to check for a pulse. Nor did he shed a tear over the shock. Nor did he lament the sudden loss of life. He simply kicked the corpse, connecting his left foot square against the man's gut as hard as he could.

            "Why have you done this?" he asked, the words scraping against themselves, clumping to a dull nothingness under the weight of the torrential rain. "Why?" They were the first words he'd said aloud for many weeks, though their message sailed no further than his own breath. "Why did you do this?" He asked again, and gave the corpse another rigid punt.

***

            An hour prior there had been no bones denting Paul's car bonnet. No envy or confused irritation. No grievance. There had only been a photograph taped to the upper corner of a canvas – the view from the Dover cliffs. The camera pointed outwards at the Channel, catching a silhouetted figure standing on the hill's apex. He had painted this scene before, a long time ago, but something final and meaningless had happened to that copy that he could no longer remember. A lingering nostalgia now compelled him to summon it and all the others to life again from fresh paint. He would soon be leaving the house for good, and leave the paintings behind with it, but he wanted to finish straightening the sea out against the sky. Only, the watercolours kept running, his hands shaking in arrhythmic pulses, and the sea level rose up with every attempt.

            He drew away from it slightly, straightening his back, and slid the hide of his index finger left and right across the bone with the opposing thumb. It bunched and flopped like rubber bands rolled over a pencil. The wind, bandied by the heady morning rain, was smearing itself against the room's only window in waved rounds. The former pushed the latter against the glass, then away, then back, then away, and every time it happened it was distracting. Maddening almost. And it was brighter than it ought to have been outside, though Paul could not find warmth for trying. The glass and its frame sat together uneasily; heat leaking from inside and sound from beyond, the brittle drumming relentless, the water's patters agitating the fibres of his inner ear like brushes against the grain. It would otherwise have been silent, he knew, and the silence normally on offer was near godly in its absoluteness.