The Forgetting Time

by Sharon Guskin

She held tightly to his waist again on the way back. It was too loud for either of them to say anything, for which she was grateful, no decisions to be made, nothing to worry over, only the palm trees and tin roofs spinning out behind her, the wind whipping her hair across her face and the warm body close to hers; this moment, then the next. Happiness began to burble in the base of her spine and rise, giddily, up her body. So this was what it was like: the present moment. She felt it like a revelation. And wasn’t this what she’d been after – this lightness that came galloping through, grabbing you by the waist and hauling you along with it? How could you not surrender yourself to it, even if you knew you’d end up sitting bruised in the dirt?

Now he could get a good look at him. He was lovely, of course, but it was the watchfulness in his eyes that drew Anderson. There was occasionally another dimension in the awareness of children who remembered; not a knowledge so much as a wariness, a shadow consciousness like that of a stranger in a new country who can’t help thinking of home.

a man cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.