What a wonderful life

What a Wonderful Life

The old man looked up from his book. The sun, slanting through thick foliage, touched his wrinkled cheeks with warm gentleness, and dappled his body. Sitting on many soft pillows stacked into a heaping pile, he looked very much like a weathered, deformed pearl on the thick tongue of a marbled oyster. He leaned against a silver birch, listening to the soft birdsong. The grove he was sitting in was small and cozy. Closing his eyes against the soft light, he smiled and thought, what a wonderful life I've lived. He thought about all of his family. He thought of his children and their children and about his new great granddaughter still yet to experience the wonders of the world. He couldn’t wait to see her bright little face. So innocent and full of life.

He glanced down at the book he had left splayed open in his lap: The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, volume VI, his favorite author. The book was a part of the entire collection that had been passed down from his great grandfather who had bought them when Dr. Jonathan Swift had been alive and they had lived in Dublin, Ireland. The old man’s favorite pastime was rereading the books over and over again. He had read the entire collection of twelve volumes three times throughout his life. However, as he thought about this, images from his time in the war fifteen years ago, flashed unwelcome in front of his mind’s eye.

When the war began, he was a young man and excited to prove his worth, and a war everyone was calling the Second Independence war seemed fitting. During the fight, he was shot and it almost paralyzed him. As he lay in a stiff cot in the hospital tent afterwards, the nurses weren’t sure he would survive such a wound. It had been a glorious day for both him and his healers when he surprised them all by standing and shuffling a few steps. However, his mobility cost him for whenever he tried to straighten his back, sharp pain shot through it like the bullet had. He couldn’t rejoin the fight, and he was sent home with a head full of horrible memories and a crooked back.

Later, when he sat deformed on an old rocking chair, he would tell his grandchildren stories. He would speak of the horrors and the miracles, of the destruction, but also of the better world he helped make possible.

He sighed, and it seemed as though all the air in his body left him. Deciding it was time to head back to his house, he slowly, creakily, reached for his cane. As he grabbed it and set it erect to lean on so he could stand up, he felt hardly any of the usual pain in his back. When he thought about it, he didn’t feel any pain at all. Slowly, he stood up and took a step without leaning heavily on his cane. It was easy and completely pain-free. He straightened out his crooked back, and stood tall for the first time in a very long time. Slowly, he made his way out of the grove of silver birch and towards his large farmhouse, leaving his cane to enjoy the shade of the trees by itself.

A wide grass field rippled between the tree grove and his house and it seemed to take him no time at all to wade across it. As he neared the house, he realized the enormity of his situation. He stopped walking. Knowledge turned his blood to ice and his muscles to water as he thought. He always walked with a cane. He knew something was wrong. The world felt different, calmer. There was no breeze, even though he saw it tickling the trees and grasses all around him. The sun shone as if through a filter of smoke, though there was none. Slowly, he turned around and walked back to the grove.

With growing dread he entered the grove to find his body lying on the pile of pillows. His eyes were open, and he had a soft smile on his face. The old man, looking at himself, thought he looked rather peaceful, though it was unnerving to see himself from outside of his body. A single tear pioneered its way down his ghostly cheek. And he was ghostly. He lifted his hands and saw the ground underneath. Why didn’t I notice this before? He asked himself.

He looked to the sky that was drawing to a close. As the clouds turned pink, and the sun grew lower in the sky, he slumped against a nearby tree. When the moon finally claimed her rightful place above, his family had already come and gone from the grove; at first exclaiming, and then crying and hugging each other. He hadn’t moved. Next came a team of white coats with a stretcher to remove his body, yet he still didn’t move. Finally, they left, freeing the grove of his pillows, his cane and his body.

At last, he looked up at a tree across from him and towards the branches that now framed the starry night sky. As his eyes traveled down from the branches, movement caught his gaze like a bramble thorn on clothing. He watched as a face emerged, seemingly growing from the trunk, followed by a neck and body. The woman had green hair and bark for skin, and her dress was woven from leaves. Her eyes were like hazelnuts, and her cheeks had a very slight rosy hue. She whispered in the breeze through the boughs above, “Your time is here. Do not be afraid; only know what must be done.” And the old man saw as her hand beckoned, a hole, brightly lit, opened up between the roots of the tree. He took her rough hand and followed her warm smile underneath the tree and underneath the ground. What a wonderful life I’ve lived, the old man thought and smiled at the hazy world around him.

He only looked back once and remembered.