THE CALENDAR
I don't think it matters where a man crosses the road, if safety is uncompromised a little adventure may be had. James always crossed here, at the corner, next to the electricity post. Adventure was not part of his life, he waited for the weekend and waited for his holiday, so he stepped from the pavement.
The hedge which bordered the far garden had rotated in a quite disconcerting way. He knew he wasn't connected to the hedge, so it could be hoped that nothing was amiss, but the hedge was still.
It was three tedious months before he could walk without sticks. Three months to come to terms with his change in fortune, but he never had a fortune so it was more a change of circumstance. His limp was, well, just that, nothing more. The car driver hadn't stopped.
James Foster sat in the staff common room, gazing out of the window at the small pond and statue which adorned the grass outside the department building. He sipped tea and checked his free periods for the month. Life was still good. Lectures took half the week and the other half was his preparation and marking time. He had enough for himself and the salary might stretch for two, if he married one day.
His leg ached so he jolted the chair backward to gain more room from the small circular table. The chair, obstinate and unwieldy, scuffed the floor. Tea spilt onto the back of his left hand and splashed onto his tear-off calendar. He mopped his hand with his trousers.
Picking up the paper calendar he saw that March the fifth was soaking wet but by the tenth the paper was almost white. The tea, of course, had made its way downward; the fifth to the sixth, the sixth to the seventh and onward. Now this was an incident of no consequence and it may be said that March was normally quite wet anyway, but he frowned.
He thought of his calendar and of a different calendar, one not yet made. A calendar of seconds, then one of tenths of a second, then of hundredths. He thought of the pages, the millions of pages, the trillions. "What difference, why none at all."
He pushed the tip of his pen through the calendar. It was the same as time passing. If the tip of the pen was his very point of existence and all the pages were there, each page an infinitesimally small division of time, then he would see time flow as he did now. He repeated his thought, "for all the pages to be there". "Then all time must have been spent already, all the future had happened, it was only that the tip of the pen hadn't reached that page yet."
James Foster arose from his chair, tea break over. He picked up the calendar and his briefcase, frowned again, then walked from the room.
It wasn't unusual for him to be a little late leaving the campus. He did his job properly and a student had asked a question after the lecture. The car park was three quarters empty as he made his way to the space where he had parked his car every working day for the last three years. He thought of work and then of his calendar. The car turned past the entrance into the public road and picked up speed.
"Maybe that's how it works, time", he thought. "All the pages are there, we wouldn't know it, not if we pierced one after another. So, each moment in time has a page in the calendar. Therefore it's all happened and can't be changed."
His thoughts circled round and round, his driving almost automatic. He turned right, not far from home now. He saw very little of the man who stepped out in front of his car. There was a deep thud and a slight judder through the steering wheel, followed by his emergency stop. James quickly opened the door and ran back the few yards to where the man lay. He knew what to do. The man, however, was quite dead.
James Foster looked at his face and uttered a wail of remorse. The face of the man he had just slain was his, not like his, but his. The body of the man he had sent to eternity was his. The clothes were the ones he wore that moment and all was without doubt a perfect copy of himself. He looked up and down the road, then opened the boot and hauled the body into it with little regard for the deceased or his back. He did not consider himself an ambulance driver or a mortician but had noticed a small tear-off calendar lying beside the corpse.
There was little he could do to calm himself as he completed the rest of his journey. Unfettered fear had taken over his mind and he didn't know who the enemy was. Something was amiss, horribly and terribly so.
He pulled into his drive and parked in front of the up and over garage door which adjoined his semi-detached house. He left the engine running and walked to the garage.
"James", the elderly man called from over the hedge. "How are you." The neighbour was a very pleasant man who looked after his cat when he went away.
"Oh, fine, just fine Tom.", replied James as he raised the garage door.
It was at this precise moment that James knew his life had gone badly wrong. It didn't take a lot of fathoming out, for before him, within his tidy garage, was a Toyota Corolla sporting the number plate he had known for many years. He slammed the door shut and glanced over to Tom.
"I'll leave it out for the moment.", he said.
Tom did not reply, he was busy cleaning the stone sundial which commanded the centre ground of his front lawn. James locked his car and went into the house.
He gazed at the steaming tea in front of him and didn't feel well. He took the calendar recovered from the road and placed it next to his mug, it was covered with a brown liquid. March the fifth was soaking wet but by the tenth the paper was almost white. He wasn't himself and shouldn't be blamed, he thought, "because I'm in the boot." His mind was going.
The calendar trembled as he read the words under March the tenth. "I ran you over three months ago, you also died."
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