Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

But these are only a few possible arcs to a life, a handful of shooting stars in the night sky. Change one thing and everything changes. A tremor here sets off an earthquake there. A fault line deepens. A wire gets tripped.

Things will look different in the morning.

She numbs her feelings, because they are bigger than she is. And not just the painful feelings—the joyful ones too.

They stay like this, two bodies so at home with each other that it is as if each of them had grown and shifted to accommodate the other’s shape over the years, like two grafted trees.

The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.

He is a practical man, but still in a wordless place within him, Ben Wilf has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes.

Here she has been so afraid, so busy trying to shore up and protect their lives that she has forgotten how to live.

Grief comes in waves. Like the swells crashing against the rocks, it gathers force and breaks when you least expect it.

The sunlight is dancing along the whitecaps. It looks as if the sea were filled with thousands upon thousands of flickering stars. Perhaps each one is what remains of every soul who has ever lived; perhaps time is not a continuum, but rather, past, present, and future are always and forever unspooling.