Chapter 19
It took me hours to find the old smallholding. The forest surrounding the crater had grown denser and wilder. Our old paths
had been wiped away, and more than once did I get helplessly lost, guided only by the ground’s meager incline and the sound
of running water—the canal that had eroded back into the creek it was always meant to be. Then the faint yet sudden smell
of smoke.
There. I spotted it through the trees. A thin line of it led down to an old thatched roof held up by stone walls—what had
once been our home. A fire was on. Someone was inside.
The hut was not a dilapidated ruin. It hadn’t been forgotten about—or it had, but it was recently being cared for. The surrounding
meadows were overgrown and ruined with weeds and brambles, flooded with swampy ponds dotted with chattering birds, but the
house itself was alight with new activity. Foliage had been pulled away and cut back from the rocky walls. Small repairs had
been done to the roof.
I knew instinctively, against all logic and reason, who was here.
It’s a strange thing how love can pull you through something, even if it’s through complacency and peace into a state of what I could only call at that moment fear as I approached the house.
It was worry I felt as the door opened. Worry of the impossible and all that it entailed.
There was Simon.
He stood in the open doorway. He was older, just as handsome as he had always been, and looked at me through the confident
stalemate of our love. He saw the glass helmet I carried and sighed. I approached him with caution. Air between us was like
a skin twitching and contracting. We were old lovers confronting our snubbed-out wicks. I couldn’t even say his name, only
“You.”
But he could say mine. “George.” He ushered me inside the house, but the expected warmth of the place was stale and drafty,
an echo of heat. We kissed like strangers, clumsily, and only as a means to try and puncture the doubt and fear still between
us. We couldn’t converse, only quip: “Sorry.” “It’s OK.” “I’m so sorry.” “It’s OK, George.” “I’m so, so sorry.” Emotions spurred
and faltered. Then a debasement of the miracle: “How?”
“Shhh.” Simon pressed his fingers to my lips. He closed the door behind me and shook his head, his curls following their same
old helixes, now flecked with gray. He took the glass helmet from me and set it on a table. “It doesn’t matter.”
“That night,” I said with trembling urgency. “The dragon. When you saw me. I wasn’t thinking straight. I was only wanting
to know more. I wasn’t going to leave. Or maybe I was, but not without you. I just wanted us out of there. I wanted us safe.”
I had spent years rehearsing these words but they still tumbled out of me like excuses. “I was a coward.”
“I know,” said Simon. He tried to smile but his face could only warble and grimace.
“I’ve had a long time to think about it.
I was angry—but not toward you. I was angry at my reaction.
Angry at how it had zapped me away from you.
It was weakness and fear, pulled in a thousand directions at once.
” I noticed his accent, how it had changed.
There was a rigidity where there hadn’t been one before and I could tell he was actively sanding it down to fit back into our older, shared dialect, frustrated with its limits.
“Where did you go?” I asked like a peasant to a god.
“The future,” he said. “At first.” He invited me to sit down, but both of us remained standing. His blue eyes had gone stony
and gray. He looked at me, but only through me, searching for words. “It was . . . deranged. There were so many people, but
none of them could help me get back to you. I could only rely on myself. Everything was so closed and paved over. The ground—right
here, even—it’s so smooth but hard at the same time, like it’s all one giant tile. The whole world is tiled over. The whole
earth is baked. And clean, really clean, like my hands”—he flexed his fingers—“are constantly dry—were constantly dry. They fixed my leg. I was lucky this place was paved over because I got help right away. And I got all that
other stuff you get there. Identification, accounts, logins, cards.” He looked at me with another forlorn smile. It couldn’t
hold back the shimmer of pain in his eyes. “And I wanted to get back here. Immediately, George, I swear, I did everything
I could. I promise you, George. I did everything.”
“I know, Simon, I know.” Saying his name made my voice break. I reached to put my hand on his shoulder but both of us flinched,
unaccustomed. Simon stepped back.
“But, George, you don’t know.” He turned away from me to face the smoldering hearth.
Light cut through the smoky haze—sunlight.
I noticed there was a window. We had never had a window before.
On the wall opposite the door was a four-panel glass window that blended seamlessly into the old stonework.
I wondered how long Simon had been here waiting for me, fixing up the place.
The roof had also been fixed and smoke from the hearth lingered heavier in the air, filtering slowly but not enough through a new chimney.
I cleared my throat, then asked, “What do you mean you went to the future ‘at first’?”
Simon’s shoulders rose as he inhaled but they did not lower when he exhaled. “I could only rely on myself,” he said again.
His back was still to me. Trees moved breezily in the new window—a window that would have needed to be formed from molten
glass, a fiery furnace, carefully cut.
“It took a long time to find you once I discovered how,” Simon continued. “Time travel isn’t precise. You’ll be in an open
meadow one second and the next it’ll be a car park, or a drainage pipe, or a stadium, or something you can’t even imagine,
or an ocean. The world changes a lot. It sweats and dries out, floods and freezes. I got lost.” He went silent. A gust of
wind droned outside. The window rattled lightly. I watched a spasm crinkle across Simon’s shoulders. “I’m devoted to you,”
he whispered, and that was all. Forgiveness pierced my heart with its gold needle.
I opened my mouth to speak but made no sound, battling waves of nausea. I could only cough and watch Simon watch birds dart
across the window, fleeing into the wind that had picked up. I waited for him to turn around, but feared what mad pleading
I would see in his face, what confessions it harbored.
But how? I didn’t ask it aloud. The smell of the place was suddenly overwhelming and I couldn’t breathe.
Smoke from the roaring hearth. The memory of our skin on each other, our winter and spring.
My throat wheezed. I really couldn’t breathe.
It was the hearth but when I looked over at it, there was hardly any fire.
The hearth was nearly out. The last embers had faded and only coal remained.
I went to open the door and air out the remaining smoke—
“Don’t open the door,” said Simon, and finally he turned around, but his face was stoic and calm. He looked at me no longer
with the endearment of shame, but with eyes that had seen the whole arc of human history and decided this moment, our union,
would be its apex. “Please,” he said. “If you don’t want to know, don’t open the door.”
But I already knew. Opening the door would not let out the smoke. It would only let more smoke in. I saw it pouring steadily
through the gap under the door, flooding the hut. The sweet heat and memory. The grandeur of being exactly where you’re meant
to be, no matter the cost. No matter the cost. It had to be no matter the cost.
I pushed open the door and the air was no clearer. Time was as fettered and constant as it always was, our present moving
along with all its orchestration and terror. And there it was, perched there on a tree branch, smaller, younger, but still
enormous with its same sly grin and leathery scales, its knowing yellow eyes and all the hundreds of years they were yet to
see.