A Little Time by Lavinia Liang

The people they have lost – and the people they have yet to meet – begin appearing in an ordinary American town. Nobody stays for more than an hour.

When the people we loved and were going to love started coming back, we knew we had failed in at least two ways. One, to properly care for the trees and the oceans, but that was no secret, and two, to properly forgive ourselves. Mrs. Farmingdale at the end of the road met her great-great grandson while she was taking out the trash, shuffling about in her pink velvet slippers with the cute embroidered rabbits. She knew who he was because he looked just like her husband the day she met him in the doorway of the local diner, when he was twenty-one and she all of sixteen. But she knew it wasn’t her husband because he would never, ever have worn an item on his head and the boy was wearing some sort of contraption up top that was neither helmet nor computer.

Mr. Morales, who managed facilities at the high school and whom we crowned King of Corn year after year at the neighborhood barbeque, met his great-great granddaughter while he was rolling the garden hose back into place. She strolled in through the side gate to the backyard, wearing the same wry expression his daughter, Dr. Eva Morales, soon-to-be married and soon-to-be Dr. Edgar, wore whenever she had big news to break.

At first, we thought they were only coming to older people, which made the collective hallucination explanation a little more plausible. It made sense, after all, said Mrs. Fang, kneading dumpling skin dough with her fat, knobby fingers, that the elderly would be the first to go. In this day and age!—with all the nuclear testing, smog, and damaged water! With the generators, the data centers! She repeated this to Old Mr. Fang, her father-in-law, after he claimed he to have met his great-granddaughter while sitting in the park one Monday that spring. He was waiting for the old Korean couple, the Parks, for their daily pre-lunch rendezvous, spoken in grunted, barely-there English. Old Mr. Fang knew a few Korean phrases and was proud of this, and the Parks could read Hanja if he wrote it out and they were likewise proud of this—frightened and annoyed and also proud that their children could not. The three seniors were a common sight in the park those days, six wrinkled hands wrapped around Thermoses of tea and containers of freshly naked fruit.

Alicia Fang’s daughter was wearing a draped dress when her great-grandfather Old Mr. Fang saw her in the haze of late morning. She looked so much like her mother that he almost chastised her for walking through the park wrapped in bedsheets. But Alicia’s daughter’s hair was light, the shifting color of living wood when sunlight sweeps through the canopy, and her eyes were a blue that was not blue. Taiyeye, she said, and then he knew. Can I join you here?

Nonsense, Alicia said at home. Yeye, you haven’t been sleeping well lately.

Old Mr. Fang banged the table and sent the silverware dancing. Mr. and Mrs. Park met her, too! But his family dismissed the old man as delusional—after all, dementia had claimed Old Mrs. Fang not long ago—and Alicia cleared the dishes.

The local news reported on it a week after Old Mr. Fang’s encounter in the park. We figured it was probably the new woman they hired straight out of Northwestern journalism school, who was always trying to try new things—who was always trying to try. The young woman wore her hair in twin braids and had no issues knocking on people’s doors before eight in the morning. The local news said the encounters were strange and haunting and hallucinatory, but not supernatural. The local news referenced the major news magazine piece from a few years ago about our county and the next two counties over, about how noise pollution lowers life expectancy, how the cooling machines running overtime, running twenty-five-seven in the fields around us, made us more prone to delirium. The local news said, stay tuned. We were already tuned.

After several more encounters, we knew they were real and we knew we were not lucid dreaming because other people saw them, could see them, too. We realized all you had to share in common with them was that they were of your blood, or you loved them or they loved you in some way. We learned that the older folks saw them first because they had more time, and the people we loved or were going to love did not. Sometimes they came for a full five minutes, full in its fullest sense, like the time Ms. Vyschenko’s grandniece appeared outside the Kroger’s, right by the cart return, held Ms. Vyschenko’s hand, and told her what really happened to her mother, Ms. Vyschenko’s niece. It was the kind of story not even a screenwriter or novelist or a Northwestern journalism grad could conjure, Ms. Vyschenko later said, dabbing her eyes at the counter at the public library. I wished it hadn’t been so, but it was not as bad as I thought, and it certainly was not as bad as never knowing. And then, Ms. Vyschenko added, when I turned around after rummaging in my purse—I thought I’d at least give her a photograph of her mother—she was gone.

Sometimes they appeared for longer. But never for more than an hour. This became one subject of debate—the length of time—as did the question posed unintentionally at the library, of whether it was better to know. Some people felt strongly about knowing for the sake of knowing, and the unsurprising pushback to that was, It depends. People said it made sense for people like Ms. Vyschenko to know, because the news and the government and books and archives could never really tell her, and even if they could, they wouldn’t. But people said it just wasn’t the same for people like the Parks, who were as reticent as they were because some things were better left in the dark. It was Old Mr. Fang who eventually told people that the Parks, too, had been approached by someone, and then there were some who said Old Mr. Fang was in the wrong for disclosing that encounter at all.

Old Mr. Fang was taken by the idea that nobody ever stayed longer than an hour. He went around the house muttering it to himself: An hour, an hour. He had studied physics very briefly in university before he was sent down to the Yunnan countryside at Mao’s command, which, after everything, at least he had met his wife there, surrounded by brilliant tea fields, viridian as far as the eye could see—and the family chalked up his recitations, his quiet chanting, to his bygone obsession with the beautiful structuring of the world—and perhaps, more importantly, and unmentionably, to those lost years. Alicia Fang’s fiancé was learning Chinese for her and he was amused. An hour, he said, literally translates to a small time, a little time. Isn’t that right? he asked, leaning back against the doorframe. Just a little time. Old Mr. Fang shot him a look.

At the end of May, going into Memorial Day, Eva Morales came back from New York—from the Upper East Side, she told us with a small coy smile, as though any of us understood what that really meant—and she was bringing her wedding gown back. It was late spring, suddenly, explosively. Wind moved through the trees largely. Eva had met her fiancé out there, as Mr. Morales was fond of saying—told everyone he had known his daughter was different the day he asked her who her prom date was and she said, Daddy, I’m going to be a pediatrician. It was true we were proud of her, too. It was true nobody had moved that far in a long time, and it was true we were surprised and a tad worried she was coming back for the wedding. Many years ago, a boy we had all loved had gone to Columbia. He had been quarterback here, had raised money through car washes and bake sales, had dated the girl next door. We named a day after him to celebrate him, some day in mid-March. We didn’t want him back. After he overdosed and crashed his car on New Year’s Eve of his freshman year, his family moved away. We don’t know where they went. We never stayed in touch.

It was difficult to pin the returners down on anything about how or why. It was fine because it didn’t matter, really, and because over the course of those few months, we had become used to it, used to them. We let them tell us things and, for once, we forgot how to ask for more.

But the young lady at the local news felt strongly about it, of course. At least we all felt that she felt strongly. We started seeing flyers and posters about town, on the telephone poles and Food Summit’s bulletin board, bright green and hot pink printouts, big bold text proclaiming: STOP. IF YOU MEET SOMEONE FROM THE FUTURE, CALL THIS NUMBER. WE WANT TO TALK TO YOU. WE WANT YOU TO ASK THEM: WHERE AND HOW ARE YOU COMING HERE? AND WHY?

Eva Morales met her late mother as she tucked the gown into her closet, away from her father’s eyes. She turned around and there was Mrs. Morales, as though she had never left, the light angling tenderly through Eva’s childhood bedroom window, golden dust motes dancing ballet in the beams. For a moment, the air was glass and the glass was blue.

Get out of here, her daughter said in a low voice.

Oh, said her mother. Oh, daughter. Your simple hatred is no match for those who hurt for a living.

We don’t know what happened, we only guessed—the same way we guessed that it was Eva who later tore down those eyesore signs, those desperate pleas for more information, for just a little more conversation. Some people said Eva broke the glass when she hurled a paperweight or a table lamp or a curling iron at her mother. Some said she did it to test the solidity of the figure before her. Some said she did it because it was understandable, given everything that had happened between them when Eva was seventeen. Some people said she ran to her mother to embrace her and found herself hugging ash that powdered the air like early spring butterflies. What we know is that, one day the neon paper signs disappeared, and one day after that the people we loved and were going to love stopped returning, too. Yet it wasn’t until several months after they stopped returning that The New York Times came out with a magazine feature on us: “Back to the Past or Collective Small-Town Hallucinations? This Town in Flyover Country Swears It’s Met People From the Future.”

Some people were livid. Some people cancelled their Times subscriptions. But most of us understood the past tense. We knew how it operated—in that same way that banal, ordinary, even commercial photographs could eventually age into artwork. We knew the past tense could throw a shimmering, gauzy curtain over everything from before; how it could unmoor memories from things we thought certain, how it spliced and buried and then excavated only moments.

How could we have let this happen? How many ways did we fail? We couldn’t remember. It had been so long. Standing outside, on the town center green, barbecue grills running and our dogs doing lazy laps around us and the drone of the bumblebees reporting for their second shifts around the summer hostas and the lackluster hydrangeas flanking the picnic benches, we couldn’t remember. The afternoon had swept those memories away.

climate Community family Future grief inheritance memory speculative fiction Story Sunday time