The Forgetting Time

by Sharon Guskin

“You think we don’t get our hearts broken, or break down crying when our children are born, or wonder about our place in the grand scheme of things?” “Okay, okay. I get it. You bleed when pricked.”

All in all, this was not the reaction she’d expected. Let that be a lesson for you, he thought as he closed the door behind him and leaned against the wall, trying to catch his breath in the too bright, fluorescent corridor, amid the rolling, unstoppable roar of the well and the sick. Never expect. It had been the lesson of his life.

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

full of the kind of Stepford McMansions she had always scorned: homes lacking any sense of history, taking up every inch of the space allotted with vast unwieldy garages.

huge brick home that reminded Janie of a plain woman burdened with too many accessories.

What was her name? It had fallen down the chute. It was gone. His mind felt as clear as ever. It was simply the word that eluded him. It was there, right in front of him, taunting him, and yet his brain balked, refusing utterly to reach out even a finger to touch it.

Perhaps he should stop. The boy would forget, eventually. But Anderson didn’t know how. He was the man who didn’t stop, that’s what he was, all he knew how to

When people are not meant to remember. That’s why most of us don’t. People are meant to forget. Lethe: the river of forgetfulness. Only some lost souls had forgotten to drink from its healing waters—forgotten to forget.

“Lady, no offense, but you don’t know anything,” Charlie said. “He was never all yours.”

“And tomorrow,” she said. “Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”

“To the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”

instead he was thinking that when his own time came, he wanted none of that for himself. Let them leave his hacked-up body on a mountaintop to disintegrate and feed the vultures, as the Tibetan monks did, until the corporeal part of Jerry Anderson was nothing but bones on a ledge.

People came up with the answers they wanted. Always did. Always would.

Wake, like the rocking waters after a passing boat, the instability that followed some major event? Wake like that? Or wake, the imperative? Wake up, Janie.

“He’s forcing me to let go of him,” she said, “to surrender to the moment at hand. There’s joy there. If you can do it.”