MONO ISSUE 1 PDF FLIPBOOK - Flipbook - Page 35
I shrug. “Or maybe you were just unlucky to have lost your shoe,” I say, embarrassed but also
touched by her heartfelt thanks. Her grey eyes look deep into my brown ones as she clasps my
hand.
"Thank you again,” she says and smiles. “I hope that one day I’ll be able to return the favour and
help you.” I think that this is unlikely since I'm a strong, able man and we are strangers, but still, I
appreciate the notion. I’m a family man and I’m happy to have saved this woman and her baby
from a painful end. I feel the beginnings of a tear forming in my right eye and I blink—
###
Early 1990s Calgary: The grey-eyed man on the escalator passed out of my view and the strange
memory–vision disappeared with him. The noises from the water fountain and the food court
came rushing back into my consciousness as I stepped off onto the mezzanine level, trying to
make sense of what had just happened and wondering if I should turn back. But then I spotted my
colleague, Susan, waving me over to the table she had managed to save us. I waved back and
walked towards her, and the day carried on as it had before.
###
I’d forgotten all about that moment until now, as I lie on the cold floor and feel the life ebbing
out of me. I never saw that man nor his eyes again, nor did I ever have another experience like it. A
bland office building in early nineties Calgary is not where you’d expect to slip sideways in time, or
backwards, or whatever it was, but there it is. I think that the memory has resurfaced to remind
me that help has been promised and is on the way.
I am dying on my birthday and I’m alone in my lovely little house. I’m scared. There must be
tears on my face, but I cannot feel them. Everything is dark now, even with my eyes open, so I
close my sightless eyes and surrender. I begin to smell woodsmoke and know that death, or
rebirth, or whatever awaits me, is very close. Someone takes my hand. I know that it is grey-eyes,
both the corporate man and the pregnant woman with the lost shoe. Slowly, my senses start to
return, and my mind and body feel light. Seventy-one-year-old me begins to dissolve and mix with
olden times-me and future–me. Fear falls away and is replaced with something warmer, wider,
bigger. Grey-eyes is beside me and leads me to a strange and familiar place full of memories and
crossings and possibilities and so many more things yet to come.
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