Biblical by Christopher Galt Page B

placing his hand on hers. “You’re all on your own here and we worry about you.”
    “I’m just fine.” She smiled. He was a good boy. She tried to recall whom it was he had married and who his children – her grandchildren – were, but couldn’t remember. “I know I’ve problems with my memory, but that’s just getting older, that’s all.”
    “What day is it, Mom?” asked George in that nasty, insistent tone he used. “Or month? What year is it, Mom?”
    She answered him, giving the exact day and date. In the same way she had a notebook with the names of the current and last three presidents, Mary had a newspaper delivered every day and left it beneath the clock, masthead up, on the hall stand next to the door. Should someone come, she could tell them the time, the day and the date. All she had to do was remember for as long as it took them to ask. Her sons, and sometimes George’s wife, a hard-faced, pushy woman whose name escaped her, had called regularly of late, and Mary had the feeling of constantly being tested. She had developed strategies to disguise her memory’s increasing flaws.
    “We’ll leave you these to look at.” George laid three brochures, all gloss, dark Florida tans and bright denture grins, on the coffee table. “Will you at least think it over?”
    Mary told them she would. Something sat leaden and dull in her chest: despite all of her strategies, all her protests, she knew that her memory was getting worse. A lot worse than either of her sons imagined. No one knew about the long periods she spent living in her past, unaware it was not her present.
    “I’ll think it over,” she said, taking the brochures and coffee cups and setting them in the kitchen.
    *
    She stood at the kitchen window and watched George’s expensive car glide down the drive, out onto North Road and back towards town. Her heart remained heavy as she watched the sun sink lower in the sky, repainting the canvas of forest-covered hills with a warmer palette. She couldn’t go on like this. She knew she’d have to leave her home of sixty years and would never again stand at this window, looking out over the hills and fields.
    She’d phone James in the morning. Not George, James.
    *
    The strangest sensation came over her in the space of a heartbeat. Suddenly dizzy, Mary had to steady herself by gripping the sink’s edge. An indistinct, motiveless panic stirred as she was seized by the most powerful feeling of déjà vu she had ever experienced. Her heart picked up pace as she was gripped by a fear that she was having some kind of attack. A stroke. Closing her eyes, she took deep breaths, forcing herself to be calm.
    She opened them again.
    The sunset was now midday sun. So bright it hurt her eyes. Spring was now summer. She straightened up from the sink and looked out over her favorite view. It was still her favorite view, but it was changed.
    It was changed back.
    There were more trees and fewer fields: thirty years back, a large part of the forest fringing the road had been cleared to extend the Fisher farm and planted with alfalfa. The forest had restored itself, full and dark and complete, reconquering lost ground.
    “Oh dear, no …” Mary said to the empty kitchen. She knew she was back in the past. Her condition must be getting worse and she had sunk back into distant memories as her mind slowly and inexorably folded in on itself.
    But that wasn’t it. She remembered everything.
    Mary remembered that James and George had just been here,that George had driven up in his fancy European car, that they had left the brochures for her to look at, and that she had decided to leave her home of sixty years so that her body could be looked after while her consciousness, her awareness of the world, slowly evaporated.
    She reached over to where she’d laid down the brochures, but they were gone. The coffee pot she had bought ten years ago was gone too, and had been replaced with the old one she had used all