“What colors,” Grin whispers through the crash.
The swirl of lights around the island were not enough to separate it from the earth entirely. A plane got through, a turbine splitting off and falling up to the floating rock. The plane followed through its wake, as if curious what force could turn falling away from the jealous pull of earth.
Grin was an inhabitant of the island, and a passenger on the plane. Both statements were simultaneously true. So as the plane crashed and he survived, he knew that there were no medical facilities to treat the seriously injured. But, it just so happened, no seriously injured were too seriously injured to recover.
A man with yellow eyes speaks to Grin as Grin pulls his two selves together. “What are you doing here, with them?” the man with yellow eyes asks.
“I was looking for Li,” Grin replies.
“Who?”
“Nevermind. She’s not here. She never was. Maybe she never was.”
“Never was what?” the man asks, sympathetically.
“Maybe she simply never was.” Grin sighs. “Tense. . . tense is everything to mortals.”
“Let me take you,” the man with yellow eyes said, “to the limits of knowledge, where you will see what is was will be. Then you will know if Li ever was is to be.”
“Remind me of your name,” Grin replie/s/d. “The narrator will not say it.”
The man with yellow eyes looks around. “Handle,” he says. “My name is Handle, for now.”
“Okay, Handle,” Grin said. “I will follow you. But first,” he says, “I must tend to the injured.”
Grin returns to the wreckage of the plane, where he remembers what it was like to be a passenger, terrified of the sounds and the shaking far more than he was terrified of the concept of “crash.” He hugs and prays for the wounded, and tells them what he told them tomorrow. “You were healed soon.” With those words in between tenses, he returns to Handle.
“I’m readier than I was,” Grin says.
“You will have to do better than that,” Handle says. “But not yet. You are still timely enough to progress.” With that, Handle turns and begins to walk across the white sands towards the blue peaks.
Grin follows. This is the road of Now, for now.
