I Got a New Chair Today.

When I got to work today, there was a new chair at my desk. I had been wanting a new one as the old one was at least 3 ½ years old, and like most of the furnishings and equipment in my classroom, I had inherited it from my predecessor. Today is also the day we were expecting a visit from the corporate office's director of curriculum. We are a lonely outpost seldom visited by anyone from those distant parts. Even before I had sat down in the chair and fingered its firm cushions and luxuriant newness, I remembered the film Stalag 17, how the Germans had given new blankets to the prisoners-of-war only to take them away after the visiting Red Cross officials had left. I sat down and leaned back. There was not the creaking sound that I had become accustomed to, the one that would always disturb the rare silence that would fall over the crowded room during a testing session.

It occurred to Cassie on day that she had never looked upon the backs of the pictures on her wall. That this would have occurred to her at all was only further sign that her eccentricity was still intact and an active part of her waking life. But, still, these pictures that had been her constant companions for decades, whose images—cubist renderings of Parisian café scenes painted by her mother and father before the war—were as familiar to her as the mole on the side of her neck. It was their countenance that had remained with her after the death of her parents and her advancement into middle age, the after-image a youth spent in the shadow of two brighter suns. As she sat looking at the frozen image of that plump waiter moving carefully through that café crowd, and the improbably angular couple kissing on the street corner, there was one aspect of these familiar old friends that remained a mystery to her. Their backs. It suddenly seemed indecent to her that she should have spent her entire life among the pictures but have never known what lay on the other side of them.

So Cassie walked over to the living room wall and, standing on a sofa, lifted one picture off the nails that had been holding it fast for a nearly a lifetime. She gently laid it down on the sofa and began to turn it over. She saw taped to the back of the picture frame . . . an envelope. Upon the envelope, written on a handwriting she knew well—her mother's. It was strange to read,

“Open the envelope, Cassie, this is important.” Opening the letter she found the following words It's about time you looked there. You always take so long to do things. Your father was like that. Please be more observant in the future.

For a while, Cassie sat down in a kind of strange trance. Whatever would have motivated her long-dead mother to have such an odd message on the back of that picture all those years ago? She strained to remember something that would have explained it. Seeing there was no date on the yellowing paper, she sat stunned. Then she laughed. Cruel joke, she thought. The old bitch playing mind games with me beyond the grave. She no doubt had put it there. . . yes, she placed it there to be . . . a cruel joke! She did not just send me a letter; that's not possible, so it must be that it was her senility, a product of her senility—made her a mean bitch at the end, though in truth mother and daughter were close.

Of course, any alternative explanation, one that might involve time machines, navigable multi-verses, worm holes—Einstein on the other end puffing away at his pipe; bad science fiction, all of it!—would have been rejected before even being entertained. Science fiction was fine when it kept to its metaphoric functions; it was ridiculous when it called attention to its otherness, sensational stories meant to excite the middle brow fan. It was a sad comment on society. Astronomy had divorced astrology some centuries before, but in within the pages and plasma screens of the modern entertainment landscape, science had not yet (or again) detached from its fictions. Two thousand years of slouching ignorance: I believe it 'because' it is absurd—I believe it is a poem, Father.

When will I go home again? Cassie's grandfather had asked. She was a girl, and he was in a hospital bed. --Soon, she assured him as he watched the magic lantern show on the wall. Said he saw a man skiing down the plaster and made a passing comment. The next time she saw him he was in another room and everyone was sad and so was she. And for the first time she felt hopeless. At the house, she went into granddad's room and out the window saw sunlight shinning on a pine tree. It was a warm early-summer day. She smelled his stale tobacco in the air and knew that magic would never touch her life again.

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