"Event Horizons" by Mary Lynn E Longsworth

 

Event Horizons

 

 

 

Event Horizon

(e`vent´ ho`ri´zon) n. 1. (Physics, Astron.) The boundary surface surrounding a black hole, from outside of which nothing inside can be observed, because nothing inside that surface, even light, can escape beyond it. The radius that a spherical mass must be compressed to in order to transform it into a black hole, or the radius at which time and space switch responsibilities. Once inside the event horizon, it is fundamentally impossible to escape to the outside. Furthermore, nothing can prevent a particle from hitting the singularity in a very short amount of proper time once it has entered the horizon. In this sense, the event horizon is a "point of no return". See also black hole and escape velocity. – Webster’s Dictionary

 

 

 

Elizabeth was only thirty-six, and already her life was a few hours from being over. Outside her bedroom window she could see the green of the early summer in the trees and hear the rain drumming against the house. From the kitchen she could smell her younger sister cooking chicken noodle soup, warming it up before she strained it to its liquid contents making it easier to be fed with an eyedropper.

"Auntie, are you awake?" the voice was the tiny whisper of a girl.

The woman nodded, and gave a slight grunt as she turned her head enough to see the five-year-old at her bedside.

"Immm wake, angellll," the sound slurred out of her mouth as tongue and lips fought to form words she once could speak clearly. Cancer may have been taking her life with merciful slowness, but the stroke she had had only last week had taken her speech, and the last of her strength with it, had almost taken her will as well.

"Can I take a nap with you?"

The woman patted the bed beside her. After loosing so much weight, there was more than enough space in the hospital bed her family had brought in for her to fit the child and her little brother, and both took advantage of it freely. Her only lament was that the boy, Patrick, snored.

"I brought a book with me," Meghan announced as she snuggled in beside her aunt and showed her the slender hardcover children’s book. "I got it from the library. It’s about angels."

"Eyyy kant red, kant telk," she tried to explain, remembering all the times she had read to her niece and nephew since moving into her mother’s house. Her sister Robyn had moved into the house, too, along with her husband and children. Three generations were working together to take care of her, to make her passing as comfortable as possible.

"I can read it to you."

The woman nodded. "Kay."

Slowly Meghan made her way through the book, elaborating more on the pictures than reading, which was far more entertaining than the text.

"See," Meghan pointed to the last page, "here’s where the angels help the babies to be born. Angels are all around them, see? Do you see angels, too?"

The woman was about to shake her head, when she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. The wave of a hand at the foot of her bed made her look to see a man sitting in the rocking chair her sister usually occupied. He smiled warmly, soft brown eyes laughing as he sat up straight and pushed a stray lock of dark-brown hair from his face.

"So, do you see angels?" he asked, lips not moving.

"Whooo arrr yo?"

Meghan scrambled to sit up, pressing her small, warm, hand against her aunt’s arm as she did so. "Auntie, I’m Meghan."

"No, himm," the woman cautiously pointed to the man in the rocking chair, wondering if she had lost her mind, if dementia was something that set in on the dying. Her grandparents had mentioned seeing people who were not in the room before they died. Her grandmother called them angels, her grandfather said that he saw men in suits come to talk business. As for herself, she didn’t know what to believe. She had remembered seeing something, mentioning it to her sister when they had been alone, but never speaking of it openly. What she had seen had not been with her eyes, but with something else, and so she had questioned it and let it go as nothing.

"Hi," Meghan waved, looking in the same direction at the rocking chair. The man waved back shyly. "Are you an angel?" she asked in the way that children do.

The man cocked his head to the side and shrugged as if he wasn’t sure.

"Meghan! Supper-time, honey!" Robyn’s voice called down the hall.

"I gotta go," the little one slid out of the bed, and waved, "Bye," before running like a heard of tiny elephants down the linoleum-tiled hall. It still amazed the woman that children, like cats, made more noise than their small size could account for.

"Timmme?" the woman asked, turning her attention back to the man sitting in the rocking chair.

"Time for you to die?" he leaned forwards, placing his black-sleeved elbows on his knees. "No, not quite yet, besides, it’s not my job, it’s his," he motioned with his chin for the woman to look behind her.

Tilting her head back, the angel standing against the headboard of the woman’s bed was not one that could have been missed, and in her opinion he could have made it easily onto the cover of a romance novel or Playgirl if the photographers were just looking at his physique. Although there had always been the question in theology about if angels had gender, this one left no doubt he was very male, and the woman blushed as she realized his hips were right above where her head rested. Gold eyes looked down upon her with an expression she could not read. His full lips curved slightly in a serene smile, adding an additional curl to the strange tattoo across his face that looked to be a thin ribbon of strange script. The long white hair framing his face set off the color of his skin adding to the appearance. He was not black like the living, not black like someone of

African descent, not even the black of native Africans themselves. He was black like the abyss of darkness, the pure absence of light.

"You are protected," he said, his lips too unmoving, but unlike the man at the foot of the bed, his words rang in her bones, and not in her head. As if to add to his proclamation, he extended his white-feathered wings, curling them about the head of the woman’s bed until the tips touched her shoulder.

"May gwand…," the woman was finding it harder and harder to speak. Fighting

with her tongue, with lips, even the muscles of her very face had become more draining

the more she tried to do it.

"Answer with your thoughts and we can hear you,"

said the golden-eyed angel nodding towards the wingless man in the rocking chair.

"My grandmother,"

she thought, making the attempt to see if what was suggested would work. "Years ago I thought I saw my grandmother have an angel at the head of her bed, but his wings were so black they were purple, and I could barely tell if it was a he or a she."

"Each person has a different set of angels, as you call them, working with them,"

explained the wingless man. "Some of us are seen, others aren’t. Some of us have to be more active in our charge’s life, it really depends."

"So you’re an angel. Where’s the wings?"

The man blushed. "I’m not exactly an angel like you think angels are. It’s rather hard to explain at the moment with you in this state."

The woman tried to crinkle her brows, but only one seemed to work and that just barely. "What state?"

"You’re in a material state of being, and you’re in a time-stream as it were. You exist, for now, in a corporeal state and are limited by the flesh and life you are in."

Cute as he was, the woman was beginning to believe that she was indeed getting close to death, and as proof of that, she was hallucinating.

"I’ve heard physics professors that made more sense than you."

"Be that as it may, I’m here as your guide and companion, and so you can ask any question of me."

"Like what?"

"Well, some people ask why they are dying, what they did to bring this onto themselves."

"I got past that already, about four months ago."

She attempted what she hoped looked like a smile. "I sort of started that grieving process a bit early."

"So you’re resigned to your fate?" there seemed to be a hint of surprise in the man’s voice.

"Fate? Is that what you call it? Me, I call it the cycle of life. I don’t know about you all, but sufficed to say all life is terminal; everything that lives dies. It depends on how you live and what legacy that you leave behind that counts."

"’You’ve got that right,’ as they say around here,"

golden-eyes’ voice thrummed again in the woman’s bones.

The man in the rocking chair blinked. "And here I thought you weren’t paying attention when I was talking to you."

"When was that?"

"All of your life. You know that niggling voice in the back of your head you hear sometimes? That’s me, although I worried that you were deaf as a post. What can I say, you’re gifted with selective hearing."

"With the way you banter, I can’t say as that I blame her," golden-eyes muttered.

For a moment the woman wondered if before she died she would have the chance to relax enough to actually enjoy the voice of the angel at the head of her bed. If it weren’t for the fact that it was a little unnerving, she was practically getting a full-body massage from the inside out every time he spoke. Heck, she had the feeling that with his voice alone he could read from the phone book and she’d have the big O, or maybe three.

The sound and feel of his chuckle reverberating through her body let her know he had heard her thought loud and clear, and she snickered as well.

"So you’re no angel?"

she asked the man now trying to studiously rock back and forth and not really doing very well at it.

"Well, ummm, no, I’m sort of your guide I guess."

"You guess? What, does the Divine play more jokes than just making Australia?"

"Australia?"

golden-eyes asked.

For an angel who had the look of the "Angel of Death" all about him, the woman was rather amazed that he was so conversational. Granted, she was not about to complain.

"You know? Australia…God on an all-nighter?"

she asked only to find she was confusing both supposedly non-corporeal parties.

"Okay, I don’t know about you two, but with us humans when we do an all-nighter, it means we stay up all night without any sleep. We get really tired, and some of us get really goofy, you know, slap-happy, and we’re prone to strange thoughts and weird jokes. So there’s God, or the Divine, up all night working really hard to get the world done, and gets to Australia, creates all these weird creatures. I mean the duck-billed platypus would make anyone think that they’d been drinking too much. I mean come on, a furred creature with a duck’s bill, lays eggs, and is a marsupial? The gloves were off with that one!"

For a moment, silence reigned.

"I don’t get it,"

said the man on the rocking chair.

The woman sighed and then heard the sound of urine trickling out of her catheter and into the collection bag. She had been too weak for the past couple of days to even get out of bed, and had only been able to drink liquids for almost the past two weeks. Up until the catheter she had been forced to swallow her pride, letting her mother or her sister help her first into the bathroom when she was stronger, then to a bedside commode, and now she had given it all up for the last option the slowly dying got. Even as the visiting nurse put it in she forced herself to laugh about it, saying that even female astronauts had to put up with such things. She failed to mention, though, that unlike female astronauts, her body was failing around her.

"So what do I do now, just fall asleep?"

"If you want,"

said the man.

"I was talking about dying."

"So was I. Are you ready?"

"Hell no!"

"Why not? What do you have left?"

The woman remained silent.

"I thought you had already said your last good-byes. You’ve already made your funeral and memorial arrangements. Everything’s been taken care of, you’ve had time to put it all in order. For all intents and purposes, you’re about as ready as you’re going to get. You just have to let go."

Tears formed in the woman’s eyes. "Is that all? Just letting go?"

The man rose from his seat, and sat beside the woman, placing his hand on hers.

"Letting go means a lot. It means more than just saying your farewells and putting things in order for others. It also means putting things in order for yourself."

"Not ready," she gasped aloud, feeling the wetness of the first tear slip down her cheek.

"Not ready for what, Liz?"

The woman rolled her head over to see her sister hobbling in, carrying both a bowl of soup and a baby in eutero for it’s third trimester of her pregnancy. Setting the soup down on the bedside table with the eyedropper she went around the bed, unseeing of either of the people in the room as she attempted to pull the rocking chair around to the other side of the bed.

"She asked you a question Elizabeth,"

said the man as he rose from the bed and helped Robyn with the rocking chair, an unseen aid to make the load lighter.

"Mmm nut reeddy to die," Liz whimpered.

"Liz, what’s wrong?" Robyn took Liz’s hand and gently settled herself into the rocker, the wood creaking under the weight. "Do you want to eat?"

Elizabeth shook her head and closed her eyes. "Angels," she forced herself to speak as best she could. "I see. Close."

Silence.

"Two," said Robyn, her voice low. "You have two."

"See themmmm?"

"Yes."

The crushed look on Robyn’s face made Elizabeth wish she had kept her eyes closed. Her sister knew it was almost over just as much as she did.

"Scared," Elizabeth whispered.

"Yeah, me too." Tears were beginning to slip down Robyn’s slender, freckled face. Reaching up, she wiped her eyes with her free hand and brushed her red bangs out of her eyes. "I’m going to miss you. So’s Mom and the kids, but you already knew that. You want me to call Alfred and your friends? You want them here?"

Elizabeth nodded. "Call. Now." Her eyes were growing heavy, along with her chest. Breathing was starting to get more difficult even with the oxygen hose forcing air up her nose.

"Don’t you want any soup?"

"Later."

"I’ll be right back," said Robyn, her voice tight, as she slowly rose and headed down the hall.

"What are you afraid of?"

golden-eyes’ voice hummed through Elizabeth’s body like the toll of a deep bell.

"Of what’s on the other side. I’m scared of what’s on the other side,"

she answered. "I’m scared of being alone, of all this being nothing but a hallucination, a figment of a dying mind trying to save itself before being lost to oblivion. I’m afraid that I will be no more. That I was wrong. That there is no afterlife, no angels, no keeping an eye on my family, nothing. I never even got to have children! After this, there’s nothing left of me on this world. I’ll be gone forever!"

"Elizabeth, we have known you all of your life, since before you were born, and after you died," said the non-winged angel as he moved to the foot of her bed where she could clearly see him. "You have always known my name, though you’ve tried to forget it. You have always known I was around you even when you weren’t thinking of me. I am no angel, but you already know why and what I am. Once, we even had a life together, hundreds of years before this one of yours. We had a son, though you don’t remember him. I couldn’t be with you in flesh in this life, myfanwy, but it never meant that I couldn’t be there for you, even when you died. You’re not alone, and you won’t be gone forever.

Trust me, you’ll see. Rest for now, and you’ll see."

 

 

 

 

Time and Elizabeth had never gotten on. Even when she had a full-time job working as an accountant, she was almost always five minutes late. Now it played tricks on her coming and going in fits and starts, as if she just couldn’t stay awake long enough in one shot. Somewhere along the line Robyn had come in with the children, and so had Elizabeth’s mother. Alfred, Elizabeth’s fiancé, had shown up and sobbed into her hand as he held it while somewhere behind him she heard a couple of her friends talking low, one of them chanting in Choctaw.

Grief was holding this room in a vice, smothering her before she was ready.

"Window," she moaned, squeezing Alfred’s hand as hard as she could to get the message across. Communicating was getting harder now. Just breathing was a chore. It was as if she had run a marathon, which she had never been in any shape to do anyhow even when she was healthy.

Someone opened the window, and the cool, moist air of an early-summer night moved over the exposed flesh of her face and arms. Beyond the rustling of people trying to be quiet she could hear the dripping of water in the down-spouts.

"I’m here, sweetheart. We’re here,"

the voice of Elizabeth’s grandmother rang in her ears, and she opened her eyes just enough to see the ghosts of the dead mixed in among the living.

"Need bigger room to fit you all," Elizabeth muttered, though she had no idea if anyone even understood her. She didn’t care any more. Her body was slowly failing around her, and she only wished it would hurry up and get it done. Like it or not, she was ready to die, and frankly it was taking longer than the nearly eternal wait in a doctor’s office.

Eventually Elizabeth found she could no longer open her eyes, and she found she had no energy to even move. Everything in her had run down except her lungs and her heart pulsing like a battery fading on its charge, and because of it, she could still hear. It was like being on the edge of sleep, but she knew she was on the edge of death. Soon she would go over, she had no choice.

Someone brought in music, playing softly in the background the baroque of Vivaldi and Handel mixed in with Mozart’s lighter, more energetic works. She heard Robyn begin recounting all the fun things the sisters had done together, and their mother joked about all the trouble she had gotten into: sneaking peas onto her little sister’s dish when they were young because she didn’t like them, or even going so far as to stick them between the cushions of the chairs in the family room where they got mushed into the fabric. Alfred talked of how loving she had been, and laughing about the float trip where they had spent more time going down the river outside of the canoe rather than in it. Her friends talked about taking her to pow-wows, teaching her how to smoke a pipe, and cajoling her into learning her own family’s heritage; she wasn’t white, she was of Irish descent, and the Irish were long-time friends of the Choctaw.

The last thing Elizabeth heard before she died at 10:05 p.m. was the sound of everyone’s laughter, and she was glad for it.

"Alright, Michael, it’s time to go,"

she thought, "and you too, golden-eyes. Let’s see what all the hubub about the afterlife is all about and if it’s up to snuff."

 

 

 

 

"Hello, I don’t remember how I got here. Where the heck am I?"

"You’re safe," it was Michael’s voice again, coming from somewhere the baby girl couldn’t see. "You’re just waiting to be born, and the not remembering is perfectly normal. It’s time for you to start a new life."

"Born? Oh, yeah, right, born." She had no idea what he was talking about.

"It’s gotten rather tight in here, you know,"

she tried another kick only to find she had too little room anymore to swing her leg.

"Of course it has, you’ve grown. Looks like it’s about time to leave then."

"Leave? But it’s warm in here, and cozy. I like it in here."

"But you just said it’s too small for you."

The unnamed baby girl stretched her neck back, looking up to see what looked to be the entrance to a small hole, a cave perhaps, made of the same yielding warm material as her home.

"I wonder where this goes." She pushed her face against dilated hole and felt it give way a little under her touch, but there was still resistance. She couldn’t get a hand up there since she had so little room to move, but a face was a head-start she figured. Given some more time she thought she might go check to see where the hole went, although she had the nasty suspicion something about being born was involved.

"Time to go, myfanwy."

"What?!"

Something began to push at her, and she felt the walls of her home collapse around her body. Terror engulfed her as she was pushed face-first into the tight, fleshy, warm cave.

"I don’t wanna go! I’m scared! What’s on the other side?"

Her mind shrieked as her shoulders were squeezed tight against her neck, and her arms were pinned to her sides. "What if I get stuck! What if there’s nothing on the other side!"

"You have no choice, myfanwy. It is as things are and as they should be. You wanted to know what was on the other side, and now you shall see."

Suddenly the cave gave way to blinding light and a moment of open nothingness before the din of sound started to deafen her, voices, people, hands the size of her head helped her wriggle free of the cave. The burst of cold as she broke free from the warmth

she had known made her gasp, and with the first intake of air into her tiny lungs, she let out every feeling of fear and uncertainty in the high-pitched wail of life.

Laughter and sounds of joy erupted in the room, and somehow it all sounded comfortingly familiar, but for now she had to convince someone to wrap her in something warm and feed her because frankly, she was just too pooped to do anything else.