The Everlasting

SOMETIMES, WHEN WE passed through time, it reminded me of climbing the yew with you when we were children.

I felt, or imagined I felt, ghostly branches against my palms, forking and dividing and rejoining endlessly.

My brain’s puny attempt to make sense of the great tangle of history, I’d thought, by using a metaphor drawn from my own memory.

But it was not a metaphor. The book was the yew was time itself, and now I followed those branches down to the trunk, and then the roots, and then farther still, until I found the tiny, hard seed where everything began.