Caroline was the next victim of the picture. When time
finally caught up to Jake, reality fell like a hard swung hammer on a thick
anvil. There was the rush of sounds—normal sounds, birds chirping, wind
rustling the thin leaves of the tall oak in the yard, the distant rumble of a
tractor, the kitchen sounds pouring over from inside the house and then the
sudden slamming thunderous commotion of the back door.
Caroline had been frozen too.
First Caroline’s jaw stayed shut, like wires had bound it
tight together. Then everything came loose. Everything. Her jaw dropped, swung
limply, her shoulders slumped, her body bent, and just before she fell to her
feet as it looked she would, she sprung. It was an altogether beautifully ugly
motion as she pounced on the picture and where Oliver had been before.
There was a sound like the lonely wail of wind on the top of
hills during winter. It may not have been a word she said, but Jake always
remembered it as one. A long and continuous wailing, “No!”
She snatched up the fallen picture and cradled it as if it
were the boy himself. What must have been going through her mind was anyone’s
guess, predicting anyone’s reaction to seeing such a completely otherworldly
event is next to impossible. She cried long and hard, her whole body shivering
with the lonely pain of unacceptance. And yet, she seemed perfectly expecting
of the entire event, as if she had been cursed once before to face the loss of
some great thing that had meant more than life to her.
Jake made steps toward her then, his acceptance far less
than perfect. He was still trying to sort through what he had just saw, one
hand reached out for Caroline, his long calloused fingers just barely touching
the feather soft frizz of her hair before it happened again.
First the sound, then the colors of the picture swirled and
leapt out on her milky white flesh and grabbed her. Jake jerked his hand back,
sudden terror seizing him, he was completely within the means to offer help—what
help there was for such a situation as this—and yet he knew only crippling fear
for himself.
She was tugged at first, like a fish caught on a hook,
testing the fisherman. She bobbed and weaved first toward the picture then
away. Her head turned toward Jake, and in the sea of her eyes he saw the mirror
images of all that came before humanity in that long ago endless night of the
starless void that once was, a deep and primeval loneliness. And then she was
gone, first in bites as the picture pulled her in, and then grand whole parts
of her body vanished into the tiny photograph. The last of her to go was the
frizzy tips of her long hair that he had just barely touched mere moments ago.
What had he done to deserve such hell?
