Member-only story
A Shift in Time
A very brief story of futures past
I’d always known Van wasn’t from here.
Not from another country, I mean, though the unplaceably off-key accent and odd name suggested as much. But really not of our world, from a different plane.
There was just something in that look in his eyes. The thousand yards went inwards, not outwards. And then went on for thousands more.
We’d talked of everything and nothing often enough over a pint, perched at the bar of the Splend’rous Sun. But never of where he was from, what had brought him here.
So one evening I decided to ask him. Out of the blue. Or out of the black, and into the white.
“Eh,” he said, with that odd vocalisation that was maybe Canadian. Or Catalan. Or Cambodian. “I thought you’d never ask. Come outside.”
I followed him into the unlit beer garden — it was far too cold to waste lighting on those foolish enough to venture out back.
“Look up past the elm — away a little to the left. You see that star? Kind of yellowish glint. Like panned gold. Like piss. That’s where I came into this cosmos. Yeh.”
My reaction should have been shocked, skeptical, sarcastic. Something. But there was nothing of that. He might just have said, “Oh, yeah, from this small town outside Antwerp. You probably won’t have heard of it.”
“Is it beautiful?” I asked. Because as always, Van’s presence had pulled me upwards, closer to the clouds, to the rarefied air.
“Is? Was. Been dead ten million years. Why I came here. Took a long time. But time? I got plenty. And the light’s still spilling out, bright as ever.”
“It seems so full of life. And yet your world’s already dead?”
“Aye. Funny thing is, so’s yours. Yous just haven’t seen it yet.”
