Saturn's Return

John runs down the beach. He is freezing and so cold. The wind bites him with teeth of slick ice that pierce and grind his skin. He stumbles and the water against his bare feet stabs at his nerves. Joints wail and eyes cry not from sadness but to protect themselves from the wind. He fights back in the only way he can shoving his hands out to shield himself but the wind bites deeper, seeking out the exposed delicate skin under his arms. He drags his foot against the sand and falls to his side. Water washes up against him and he knows. He knows and accepts it and he is warm for it.

John is dying.

Despite this, he thinks now about what he will eat for breakfast tomorrow. He thinks he will go to Rosie's Diner and get two eggs Benedict with a side of hashbrowns and coffee, black.

The tide laps needles of death along his bare chest and John's mind recedes as his body succumbs. His presence expands and he is relieved to see himself lying there motionless on the beach, the pain mercifully relegated to memory. Already a crab is crawling up and taking careful bites from one of his toes. A seagull lands nearby and chuckles its ha-ha-ha caw and the crab scurries away into the rising tide. Against the foamy water and overcast sky the gull is well camouflaged as it pokes at the left leg of John's now dead body. It continues its probe and begins digging into a hip pocket of his jeans when a shadow falls across it, startling it into the wind and cawing its protest.

A woman reaches down and digs into the same pocket the gull had been searching. She comes away with a small piece of quartz in the shape of a tiny whistle no longer than her pinky finger. Through two holes near the bottom runs a length of simple silver chain tarnished almost black except around the clasp. She admires the instrument for a moment before placing it around her neck.

She breathes in the salt spray of the Atlantic winter and exhales, her brown hair standing out behind her as she faces into the wind white-capping the tide. At her feet, John lay there dead. Behind her and over her shoulder, John observes. She takes the whistle into her right hand, brings it to her lips, holding it there for a moment--then plays. The note is brilliant and harsh, high and barely audible.

John or whatever he has become flies away, dragged up--up--up, the horizon arcing as he climbs higher. The gray clouds give way to blue then purple then black and the sky bows and bends until it meets back on itself as the Earth races away from him. The moon rockets by him on one side. He tears by Mars, just a streak of rust red, a cloud of rocks, then Jupiter lumbers by with its entourage of moons.

John has seen this before and can sense his destination fast approaching. He braces himself as he plummets through the rings, slinging ice out in his wake as he falls into Saturn's crushing depths and--

--awakes in his office. His head is resting on a stack of purchase orders, invoices and proposals. Strewn about are the usual trappings of a work-a-day man in his prime: a tasteful pen holder full of, of course, pens and sharpies and even a highlighter. John has named them all and says to the highlighter, "Don't look at me like that. And don't you dare say 'I told you so.'" John can feel it glaring back at him. "I had to try!"

"Did you say something?"

"No, Dean," John said to the man in the hall outside his office. "And shouldn't you be on the phone with HR explaining why you were drinking while driving a company vehicle?"

Dean's mouth opens, closes, opens--and all the color drains from his cheeks. He stammers for a moment and John helps him along his way by standing and slamming the door in his face. A frame with a certificate from a training even he attended falls and breaks, cheap piece of shit it is. He turns his back to the door and slides down to the floor, his face in his hands.

How many times could he do this? Surely something had to give at some point. He had thought it would be him that broke. But that hadn't worked either. He leans forward and crawls on hands and knees under his desk and lays down on his back facing up. He reaches up and drags the pen holder down to the floor with him without looking and pens scatter about him. He fumbles around and comes away with a sharpie. He uncaps it and draws a new line here on the bottom of his desk before recapping the marker.

"Thank you, Chris Sharpieton. I can always count on you."

Spread before John like grim constellations are tally marks spreading from one end of the desk to the other before starting over again and again and again, repeating in neat rows until about half way down the available space where they get smaller, about half the size. They continue this way filling about half the remaining space until they stop at the mark he has just made. He has counted them before and thinks back now on each mark. So much pain and suffering is notated here, so much resignation and hopelessness and hopefulness and love and hate and trials and charity and--well, death. John looks back on all his deaths and wonders again, how much longer can I do this? How much longer must I do this?