Fiction #2: Now and Then

It is Sunday morning. 10:45 AM. They should have left 30 minutes ago. At the designated meeting place --- the lamppost on campus, the one that looks like it belongs in Narnia --- Maria is standing, waiting for her brother to show up. Exasperation blankets her face. They should have been walking down the hill by now, chatting with the rest of students who also decided to brave the cold weather today. And yet, he is nowhere in sight. Wrapped in woolen mittens, her hands fumble for her phone.

A few beeps are all she is greeted with as she leaves yet another message. Please come, her face pleads. Her legs fold under fatigue onto the curb of broken concrete.

Just last week he did this to me too, she recalls, feeling as though he had abandoned her as regret spilled out of his voice on the other end of the line, confessing, “Sorry, can’t do dinner tonight” for the thousandth time. All Maria wanted was to share a meal with him. To spend time with him. To remind him that though the wind will sucker punch his stomach and knock him down onto the ground --- then give him a few seconds to stand up, only to knock him back down, relentlessly --- he has a sister who will sucker punch back the wind.

She looks down the road. Five more minutes is her ultimatum, then she will start walking to church. Her phone flounders through her fingers as she plays with it, rotating it nimbly again and again and again. A father strolls by with two little girls perched in their red wagon. Her eyes flit down the road once more, then twice. The red wagon moves farther and farther away.

Five-years-old, a little boy races down the driveway in his little green truck, decked in the widest grin, tiny pearls of teeth sticking out as jovial laughter emanates from his mouth and fills the cerulean sky.

Maria stands up, stretches her back, irons out her dress with her hands. Threads of gold begin to weave through the curtain of gray clouds. And then, before taking one step, she hears feet padding down the pavement a few yards away. Her eyes flit back up the street, and there he is, barreling down towards her, waving his arms. And for a second, she sees her little brother racing down the driveway in his little green truck.