Twelve Minutes

By Michael Sean Erickson

A wise ass once said that you can experience an eternity in a moment of time. I'm not so sure if even God can squeeze an eternity into a blink of an eye; but perhaps He can do so in the span of twelve minutes. Certainly that is what our hero fears, as he seems to be awakening into the same nightmare over and over and over....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Sean Erickson
• Release date: Jul 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988599741

Michael Sean Erickson

Michael Sean Erickson wears many hats. Some of them are as trampled and lost as the Lost Sombrero. Others are being stored still in a tidy space at the rear of his closet. Among his finer adornments, he is or has been a political consultant, an essayist, an Anglican Catholic Priest, a stage actor, a husband, and a father of a Shih Tzu. He is from San Jose, California, but lives currently in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with his beautiful wife, Sharon, and their Shih Tzu, Shansi.

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Twelve Minutes

Michael Sean Erickson

Hot Chili Press

Copyright © 2013 Micheal Sean Erickson

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ISBN: 978-0-9885997-4-1

First Edition (ebook, version 1.0): 2013

Published by Hot Chili Press at Smashwords

E-book and cover design: Patricia Garcia Arreola

BRAD massages the kink in his neck; an old rugby injury that flares again, whenever the temperature cools enough to harden a late afternoon slush into a splatter of hail; and pulls himself out from a strange dream that, in spite of his intentions, still presses like a heavy sheet wrapped around the living room sofa.

He tries to shake the images from his mind; a loop of yellowed snapshots of some of his best tackle busts on the old pitch that would have been no more than his everyday stroll around a run down block of memories, except for a sad and brooding malevolence that is slowing down the loop and stealing from the snapshots what little color remains; a film on a white screen that is graying just a bit more with every repeat of the reel into the solid blackness in the theater.

But the kink turns into a nasty spasm; and he cannot shake his head side to side, let alone arise from his tomb of feather downs and blankets. He has no choice but to lie there a while and listen to the hail punching into his concrete.

A storm cloud passes overhead and momentarily submerges the universe; an existential reality that at this point in time extends from his mess of feather downs and blankets, through the shake, rattle, and roll of the sliding glass door on the other side of the living room, across the top of an empty swimming pool that is being filled by hail, and into a wavy fence draped by dead bougainvillea; into the darkness of a dense night; a lights’ out effect that means that the film is over and that the one remaining shmuck in the seats needs to drop his plastic Jumbo Coke and to shuffle back into a reality of dead stars dotting a paper sky.

He looks at the digital clock that he had placed on his coffee table when he had opted to abandon his kitchen prep and to wink out for a couple of hours beneath a Casablanca wood ceiling fan that has not been operable since Ronald Reagan cupped his ear and acted as if he could not hear Sam Donaldson’s rants.

It holds to the very end of 4:04 as if not wanting to press forward into an unknowable darkness; the last second of that minute seeming to stretch into an eternity that is about to be closed off from all future points in time; and finally it clicks over to the 4:05 that has been waiting patiently on the other side of an impassable divide for its chance to glare into this world through its eyes shaped as digital red numbers and in its body of wires and batteries encased in plastic.

He feels a sudden jolt of excruciating pain, as if the spasm in his neck at once spreads to the rest of his body and excites every muscle and tendon into a mad scream. It recedes almost as immediately into a confused tantrum; a back and forth between pain and serenity that brings to mind a battered soul moving in and out of an out of body experience; and then finally settles into the sick in the stomach doldrums of a hangover from hell. Except that it is not a hangover really, because the taste of stale liquor is not there. Instead, there is a coppery taste and texture that brings to an uneven mind blood drying over cracked lips.

Brad senses that the 4:05 is focusing in on him; a monster with the three red eyes of 4 and 0 and 5; an earthy animal mind in a soul that is so mechanical as to be impervious to any pleas; a vicious predator unmoved by the wide open eyes and the trembling lips of a last moment prayer; and he wants to backhand the menace off of the coffee table and smash it into pieces with his seven iron.

But he is too tired still; and that is a stupid thought, anyway; probably a bit of childish nonsense dredged up from what remains of his dream; or perhaps a bit of fear about what may be in store later this evening; and so he sinks back into his pillow and stares at the dead wood ceiling fan until the spasm subsides back into a dull kink in his neck that is quite irritating but at least manageable.

Surprisingly, that does not take too long. It has just clicked over to 4:07, when he feels well enough to lift his husky, old beef off of the living room sofa; a slow and heavy act not unlike an invisible crane lifting a slab of cold meat off of a sweat stained sofa and dragging it around the coffee table and over to the sliding glass door; a slow motion slide that ends with a pair of open lips, kissing the glass, and feeling each of the hail punches upon the other side of the glass, as if they are dagger thrusts against his gray teeth and into his dried up tongue.

And yet the hail strikes do not bother him. They are a welcome diversion from the persistent kink in his neck; and so he stays right there a minute or two longer, leaning his full weight against the glass, and staring into a maelstrom of wind and ice that seems more as if an impressionistic canvas than a real storm.

A scratchy wind howl, and a soft but rapid quiver in the glass that seems to suggest that it could explode at any time, snaps life back into his dead eyes.

Brad drops his chin into his neck and skulks through the master bedroom, as if he is a burglar in his own home who does not want to wake up that bitchy, aging Ghost of Marriage Past who is curling up even now on her side of the bed.

It is the only clean and tidy room in his home, since he never lingers any longer than necessary to go in and out of the master bathroom. It is also a kind of past time vault; the last moment a few years ago when they were contented to be together in this very room, when indeed they could and did consider it to be theirs, since then taken out of the chronological flow of time and preserved like something that is dead and stuffed; even their posed wedding photographs; he still sporting a mustache, she twenty pounds lighter; still leaning on the top of an Oriental chest of drawers that they had purchased together in Hong Kong.

But he never actually looks at any of this. He even thinks every now and then that he should sell the furniture in this room and replace it with the cheap and comfortable affectations of a bachelor’s pad; maybe even position a mirror on the ceiling above his bed, and stash beer and porn beside his thick mattress.

Of course, that is never going to happen. He is a married man; keeping a gold wedding band still on his left hand; no matter the signatures on the formal dissolution of marriage papers dated almost two years ago. He is holding on; no reason that he can tell,