“What if tomorrow’s the last?”
Twice, he’s asked his mother. Two scenes transposed like a fold, where distance replicates call and response until they look the same from above. Thunder rolling in heat lightning. Cattle straining their chords. Mom repeating her answer. Both moments reside in the sounds of evening, though the man can’t differentiate. Sitting at the table, Arthur traces how he got to this point, back to his childhood home. Did he drive? Did he fly? Mom picking him up at DCA, alone, because that’s one difference he can identify? What about all the weights that haven’t lifted? The heat of the air. Fires coming this far east. Viruses spreading like smoke. Homeowners abandoning ship.
The first scene is set in 2008. That Art is sure of because of the crash. Mom is poring over papers in a rapid shuffle. Flapping, tearing, then a single cut. Art remembers the messy table of cold food—Dad still at work—as always. The house is huge, but no one is buying. Back then, Mom slices her finger on the last page. Back then, it feels like the world is ending. Or is that the second scene? Where Art comes back from art school? Mom flipping through a new set of documents? One difference already noted: No one coming home. Space truly empty. Art tries to remember when Dad moved out, or if he’d always been gone, but maybe this most obvious distinction doesn’t matter. Maybe the little differences don’t either. The fact that this scene smells of chicken curry, rather than tomatoes. The fact that this scene shows Mom actually selling the house, receipts in hand. The fact that this scene takes place fifteen years later, post-puberty, depression, dog death, college, rejection, and U-Haul rental south.
No, looking out the window, Arthur doesn’t think it matters. The storm veils every cluster of meaning. On another night, his mother would’ve pointed out the many shapes their lives could take, but now both scenes turn promise into doom. Arthur, the boy in 2008, is terrified. What he doesn’t know is that heat lightning—looking like some apocalyptic effect, charged by pollution—is only a far-off thunderstorm. He doesn’t know that the cows next door are only crying over food. All he witnesses in the moment is a flash, prompting the question beginning this cycle. But where the first derives from fear, the second implies hope. Once more, lightning breaks the sky, Mom bleeds her finger, and Arthur asks. A plea for the floods to come. A wish for the monsters to walk. What if. What if memory overlaps even in the potent moments? What if scenes run together, losing their definition? What if the only way to save something is to place it into a larger narrative, one where, yes, tomorrow is the last?
In response, Mom reaches across the table. Her bloody thumb stays upright as she slides her palm under her son’s. A hole has poked through the fold. Dripping down her knuckle, a single streak of blood. It runs along the joint and into the crease. It dangles over the ridge of her fingerprint. Arthur notices the sweat forming between fifteen years of memory. His own body fighting to keep feeling, even if it can’t stop interminable time. Nothing can, says his mother, yet there’s comfort in her grasp. As if surrendering allows for recognition. As if holding on tight quantifies the moment. And when the drop of blood does fall, Arthur feels both scenes as he couldn’t before. A past and a present. Two vessels marked by stains.
Tristan Steffe is an MFA candidate in fiction/prose at UNCW, where he currently serves as a TA in the Publishing Lab. He grew up in Maryland, outdoors, always in the woods with his sisters and dogs. New work appears in journals such as Anti-Heroin Chic and Glass Mountain.