Loop
That world lasted five hundred years.
Great pillars of stone, dragged on the raw shoulders of millions of slaves across shimmering white beaches, split the sky either side of the temple. Rolling oceans of people came to prostrate themselves before them, eyes ablaze with reverence every time they drifted towards the granite peaks. The couple stood together at the temple's zenith; he slid a glinting knife edge across the throat of the offering, rolled the mutilated body down the stairwell and turned to clasp her hands. In time the pillars crumbled and drifted into dust, which clustered within the earth that gave rise to forests and quiet villages. She would watch at the door of their thatched cottage as he trod off to the mill, waving all the way down the earthen road. That same wave, accompanied with distinctly more lubrigious overtones, carried him away on a train weeks after his conscription letter. He would reach the beach in Omaha, and the second letter would leave her face down on the dining table, dragging nails across the mahogany surface as glottal gulps caught in her throat and eyeliner smudged her cheeks, but he would be laying a fond peck on each of those cheeks as they danced across the ballroom -
***
In his room, David sat reading by lamplight. At the close of each page his eyes drifted to the clock on the wall. Above him, the glow of the lamp sent streaks of boxed, angular light pouring over the ceiling and segments of wall. Grey shadows smudged framed pictures and banal landscape photography. The ratio of page-to-clock glancing increased with every passing moment. Soon David's nervous eyes were frittering towards the ticking hands at momentary intervals, snatched from the text before him across the room.
From the garden outside, the sound of a twig snapping split the air. David gripped the edge of his desk and rose slowly. Creeping over to the window, he drew the thick curtains back and peered into the darkness outside. A gentle breeze shook the leaves of the trees at the end of the green square. He saw her approaching the window, her hair following the path of the wind. She strode from the centre of the garden, moving several steps forward. Thereafter she seemed to have trouble with forward momentum, and was briefly stuck in a continuous cycle of extending her left leg forward, which jerked awkwardly back and forth. A sliver of moonlight trickled over her as she flickered alternately between the two positions.
David lowered his head and looked back at the clock. Two minutes had passed. It wasn't usually this long. He ran through his previous thought processes as he watched her wrestle with the act of propulsion in his back garden. Six months she had been coming now. The first thought was to go to the garden and confront her. The stumbling block was that he could not walk any further than five paces himself during the times she came.
Somewhere deep in the black pools of time that swam across his pupils, he knew that it should not have taken this long; that it should have been a much smoother transition. Her limbs jerked in time to the rhythm that hindered his own movement in everything he did. The coffee cup that he raised to his lips every morning stalled even for the tiniest fraction of time; the mirror in the bathroom cabinet caught a fleeting reflection of something grey, fractured and rotting as he swung it shut, but his mind refused to acknowledge it, or left it scattered amongst the multitude of fragmented, distorted images that struggled to condense themselves within his consciousness.
The second thought had been to phone the police, to phone anyone. In this he felt uncertain, as it would require him to describe her face, and she had none. Her features, from the hairline at the top of her forehead, were a continuous mask of pale skin stretching across her skull.
For two months he had negotiated a period where he had concluded he was, in fact, utterly insane, and his madness was manifesting itself in this set pattern every evening. Perhaps it was a form of post traumatic stress after the crash, or a product of displaced grief. Recently he had moved on to a phase wherein he had decided this was a simple, natural extension of the living environment, albeit one that people chose not to mention to one another.
