The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

but when you thought about it, a house was a foreign object, invasive to its surroundings. Nature would keep trying to assert its dominance, to force its way in. Walk the aisles of any hardware store and you would know this. Row after row of poisons, traps, and tools, designed to beat back what rightfully belonged.

She had read somewhere that mothers mourned past versions of their children. It was impossible to know if it was the last time you would ever change a diaper, or rock your baby to sleep or carry him from one room to the next, until you were on the other side of it. Sometimes the child who greeted you in the morning was somebody altogether different from the one you kissed good night.

“Jane, have you ever noticed that it’s always women who believe in the unseen? Men might believe in God, maybe even heaven, but they’re not willing to believe in ghosts. Life after life. I think it’s because they have no concept of life before life, how it feels to imagine a person and then bring that person into existence.”

It never failed to astonish Jane that an event, a local tragedy, could shape an entire generation and then be forgotten. It was no one’s fault. There was too much history to contain. Down through the ages, men had tried by agreeing on what was important—wars and explorers and kings. But where did the rest end up? What was it worth?

History could only ever be as meaningful as those alive were willing to make it.

Caitlin proposed that they call Marilyn’s part of the show Five Lives. Because once, after several martinis, they were talking about reincarnation and Marilyn said she didn’t believe in the concept as others defined it, but that she had lived five distinct lives in the span of her one lifetime. This was something she had often thought, but never uttered out loud until then. The definition of a lifetime, as she saw it, was when the people most important to you wouldn’t recognize the ones who previously filled their roles.