Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

The whole reason you build a bridge together is so the water can run under it, right? And not wash the two of you away? Sometimes one of you makes it flood, and then the water recedes. Your father could infuriate me, but I loved him, and he was always going to be the one I gave it a go with. So, no, I don’t regret it. I’m glad I stayed.”

What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we’ve done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say “time and again” when something is bothering us and “it’s time” when something is supposed to end. Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities: more time; more air;

Over and over, she’d learned that what the dead most often conveyed was love and forgiveness. She could only conclude that these were the two most important things in the world—so important that people carried them into the afterlife for the sole purpose of being able to hand them back to the living. And then the living prayed to have them bestowed upon the dead.