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The Memories (short story)
It's quiet now, it's after midnight and the house is cool and lonely. I'm the only one up at this hour, the only one thinking, the only one sturring. The only one remembering what went befor.
I work backwards though this oneway life. Remembering the pets we had, the children, grown and gone. Looking at pictures, letters and cards, remembering what I can.
I see me and a boy of eight romping in the yard, my wife too tired to join us, tired just watching us, the dog, just a pup then, Maxi, gone now some twenty years. I remember the old house and what this old body could do.
Just thinking alone in the quiet seconds of life and time. Each thought a second, each second a new memory drifts by. I turn the page and turn the years, one drifts into another as one thought to an action.
This one of his gaduation, that one of mine, our mariage, his, our children, his. They stare and smile at us across time and across the page from eachother.
Ahh... The first tooth, the sleepless night that acursed thing caused. His first days at school... his first report card... How do you fail first grade classes? Ohh well, the first fight, looks like Jack vs. Golieth, with Jack winning, kinda. Split lip and a broosed set of knuckles is what he got.
The thoughts begin to fog, the pictures fade. I pull down more pictures and dust off my brain.
Ahh! I forgot how much a ladies man I was in uniform, and how rash and arogent too. "Nothin' could harm ME", or that's what I thought until... The next picture is a scene of an eighteen year old couple. One with privites stripes, the other a nurses garment... Ahh, the good and the bad, that's how they come.
Well as time flows, the memories fade, the eyes droop, so off I go with my thoughts to the room that I share with one who also has memories of me.
