Scraps on the Floor
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Snip Snip Snip …
The sounds came and went. No one heard them. If they had, would
they even know what it meant? The moment was there, and then gone. Like a forgotten
memory.
A moment stolen. Past, present, future – it didn’t matter, it was
all the same. Before, after, connected, discordant. It could come from a million
different people and a million different places. A tapestry.
Lovers in the rain who didn’t know each other. A family reunion of
strangers. A war between allies.
There was no connection. No context. A new timeline without
reason, cause or effect. The only relevance was the best of the best moments
stung together in whatever way possible to make the powerful and vibrant new.
The Moment Thief, editing the precious, one second of space-time
at a time. A little bit from here, a little bit from there; a dash and a
sprinkle and the dust of time itself. Stolen bits of anything and everything.
The spices of life. Claimed, taken away, tossed around, rebuilt and reused.
Who needs a past when the past was disappointment? Who needs a
future if the present could be twice as bright? The boring parts were gone.
Endless heart and soul and top ten emotional moments. Everything could be an
extreme. Everything could be only the memorable. Passions were met. Whims
indulged. Everyone was a winner.
Time could blur and blend like everything else and smooth over the
rough edges. Who or what didn’t matter. The action required, the amalgamation of
moments, was all it took. If could be anyone as long as their fraction of space-time
could be spliced in with any other.
Michael was young and old and wasn’t there and was somewhere else
all at the same time. He was Michael and Mitch and sometimes Adam and once in
awhile Michelle.
Jeremy was a race car driver, stunt driver, getaway driver, in a
car crash, avoiding a bicycler, running a red, stopping at a stop sign,
speeding, slowing down, drifting and parked. There was no car.
Nancy waited by the phone, went out, stayed home, danced,
traveled, die years earlier, had a promising career, had children, lived alone,
spoke multiple languages, got lost in cities, never spoke to strangers.
Key moments. Over and over and over. An infinite number of
moments. Detours and repeats and loops to be relived again and again. Things
happened like a shuffled deck of cards that were then thrown all over the
place. No order. No causality. No direction. Random moments mixed with other
random moments and shuffled and reshuffled and draw and redrawn in any order.
Time was supposed to tell a story. Time was supposed to put things
together in order, a neat little package, that made sense. The Moment Thief had
no order, no story other than the ones he created. He was an editor, producing
his own film to watch. The only things that mattered were the things he chose
to matter.
No comments:
Post a Comment