“The past is never dead. It’s not even past."
Requiem for a Nun, by William Faulkner
Emma stood in the semi-darkness of the hallway. It was a narrow passage, its chipped wooden walls high enough to make her feel small but not high enough to be intimidating. She could see the ceiling fading into a strange dark-silver mist, as if storm clouds were gathering above her.
She could see the doors on either side of the hallway.
Emma hadn’t come from either of them. Maybe she had dropped down from the silvery ceiling—who knows? Or squeezed through the cracks between the marble floor tiles. Or just popped into the middle of the hallway out of nowhere.
No, not out of nowhere. From her wish. A wish she had been repeating to herself for the past twenty years. I want to go back to that time. I want to go back to that life-changing event and stop it. I want my life to take another direction. I want everything to be different.
Emma had envisioned the realization of that wish in many forms. Sometimes it was two pills she had to choose from—one blue, one red, just like in The Matrix. Sometimes, a fork in a lonely, dust-covered village road. And sometimes, a hallway with two wooden doors.
Emma looked to her left. The door at the bottom was open. Its edges, rocking in the slight wind, revealed a bumpy pavement, rich with spring grass pushing through tiny cracks between the stones. The pavement led to the base of an apartment building. She could see the edge of the first-floor balcony—so low it almost touched the ground. The yellow plaster on its outer side was peeling off.
Emma knew that balcony all too well.
Twenty years ago, when she was twenty-six, she had walked along that pavement, lost in thought. She had gone to the grocery store for raspberries—she wanted to clean them, dice them, and sprinkle them with cream and chocolate. Then she would grab the bowl, sit in front of the TV, watch her favorite show with the soft, fluffy cream melting on her tongue, and…
…she had slammed her head—hard—into the sharp concrete edge of the balcony. She had meant to duck under it to take a shortcut to her block, but her absent-mindedness knocked her out. When she came to, she was lying on the ground. The world was blurry, spinning, unnaturally bright. Emma could barely stand and crawled to her apartment. Inside, she collapsed on the bed and called her mom. The moment Emma heard her mother say Hello! and opened her mouth, she realized she couldn’t speak.
Her mind wasn’t the same for the next two years. The severe concussion was accompanied by minor bleeding—not life-threatening, doctors reassured her, and it would dissolve on its own. But it was enough to ruin her law career, her relationship with the first man she had ever loved, and her entire world.
When Emma turned twenty-eight, she felt well enough to travel. She went on holiday to Berlin. There, she met a German college professor, and six months later, they were married. They had two children. Their life turned out well enough. Emma never worked again, but her children and her knitting hobby filled her time, and she liked the Sunday meetings at the local Catholic church. The German professor wasn’t the love of her life (that had been taken from her by that horrible accident), but he was… okay.
No.
The truth was that Emma hated her life.
She wished she had never hit her head that day, twenty years ago. She wished she had stayed with the love of her life. She wished she had continued her job at the law firm and become a prominent lawyer. She wished for everything that had been taken from her.
Now, she had the chance to take it back.
Emma stared at the open door on her left. If she passed through it, everything would unfold the same way it had before—the accident, the two-year recovery, the trip to Germany, Hans, the kids. She knew that path so well. It was familiar, well-traveled… safe.
Slowly, she turned her head to the right. The wooden door there was closed.
Emma gazed at its glossy, dark-brown surface. A golden knob sat at the center, glinting in the dim light like a flickering candle.
Beyond that door lay the other road.
No head injury.
No leaving her job.
No losing the love of her life.
She kept staring. The surface was indented, dark-reddish, cratered—like the planet Mars, hiding traces of unknown life.
She blinked, and the surface resembled gravy atop a dish she had never tasted, fine enough on the outside but concealing something unfamiliar beneath.
She blinked again. Now it looked like the depths of a sun-heated ocean. Tempting… and unfathomable.
Emma turned her head to the left. The door there remained open. The pavement was still there, the peeling balcony edge unchanged, yellowish crumbles of plaster scattering in the wind.
She turned her head to the right. The door was still closed. But now, it seemed smaller, farther away, almost invisible.
Unreachable.
Emma shuddered. She looked left again and saw the open door was starting to close. Not fast, but if she lingered, she’d lose everything—Hans, the kids, the knitting, her whole life.
Forever.
With a clenched fist and a deep breath, she rushed toward the narrowing gap, back to the familiar bumpy pavement.
Hello, friends! I hope you enjoyed my story! If you subscribe, you’ll get one short story in your inbox every week. The next one will meet you with a man who will do anything for beauty.
Always yours,
Nev
Profound. Sometimes life is exactly how it should have been, it just takes us a while to see it.
That was quite entertaining Emma is been too harsh on herself. I wish she could give herself a break and be grateful for the things she has.