In a flash
By Ricki T. Thues - 2025
Hospice has been exhausting.
I lie in my bed with the quiet clink of dinner dishes and whispered conversations floating upstairs. Out of the window, the neighborhood murmur is drowned by the rattle of my breathing.
My breath comes broken. It is chains whipping in a metal pipe. Each draw of air scrapes the silence raw.
Suddenly, my breathing stops. The loudest sound is the quiet between heartbeats.
I look up through the skylight over my bed. I see my earliest memory, a newly leafed acacia tree in the bloom of spring.
The tree sways in the wind and is pushed aside by my aunt’s living room. I stand naked except for my cowboy hat, gun holster and Roy Rogers cap gun. Cousin Susie points a finger, laughing. I draw my gun in an epic showdown.
Playing in the garage rafters, I slip from the beam scraping my leg across an exposed nail. Blood trails from me as I cry, running into the house calling for my mother. She calms me, cleans my wound and pins it together with butterfly bandages.
In the front yard my father lobs a baseball underhanded. I swing my 28” Slugger and miss the ball by a mile. Dad takes my hands and slides them up the bat. My next choked-up swing connects and flies the ball across the street and into the neighbor’s window.
The woof woof of the helms bakery truck whistle draws everyone into the street. I smell the yellow and blue van before I see it. The long wooden drawers are pulled open. I lose myself in a hot, glazed butterhorn.
In a forgotten corner of the library, Polynesia teaches Dr. Dolittle to talk to the animals; Space Cat floats in a spaceship, twisting and flipping in wide-eyed surprise; "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go."
Holding the T-handle of a short length of water ski rope, I fly along the shore, my father pulling me along at a run.
Each vision is syncopated with the beat of my heart. It is the only other sound in the room.
“‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than this,” the priest says at my first mass, the requiem for John Kennedy.
Dressed in the Baskin-Robbins ice cream manager uniform, it is late at night. High school classmate Larry and his family of 12 enter the empty store. I serve each of the Dougherty dozen a different flavored cone (3/8 of all the flavors). Larry’s father, the owner of Dirty Time company, gives me a Spiro Agnew watch in payment.
The starter of a CIF finals high hurdle race fires his gun. I fly over the hurdles, my short stride alternating lead foot, four steps between. The sprint at the end snaps a finish tape across my chest.
Six hours of minute movements assemble the time-lapse animation under my 8mm video camera frame by frame. Later seen in moments.
At the end of the woodland stations of the cross is a clearing where a crucifix stands. The lyrics of The Boxer play, “I am leaving. I am leaving, but a fighter still remains.”
“You may kiss the bride.” My wife is so beautiful that I hardly notice my friends, uncustomarily costumed in pretty dresses and tuxedos.
“Where are the counter-seam bolts?” I ask. “In the counter-seam bolt department,” says the wood shop owner.
I have never driven a forklift, but at a labor call on the Anaheim Convention dock the foreman yells, “Who can drive a forklift?” I raise my hand and am delivering crates to booths in no time.
A string and pencil slip around two nails to create a compound ellipse-shaped platform for the newest X jet full-sized model.
The sound of my heart speeds to staccato as the scenes in the skylight hasten.
My out-of-tune Mustang is struggling up the cliff road hugging the cliff on the wrong side. At the last minute I veer right to avoid a full head-on collision with a teenager’s car. Both cars are destroyed. No one is hurt.
We are playing the video game I wrote in BASIC. My best friend, the programmer, thinks the game plays very smoothly. I show him four typed pages of code. He shakes his head, writes two code blocks on the back of one page and says, “I think this will do the same thing.”
A favorite computer client of mine asks me for my best consultant’s advice. I say, “Never trust a computer.”
Five seconds out the door on my first skydive, I am floating in midair like Space Cat. Like the spacewalking doodles I drew as a child.
We are standing in front of the little red house in Aguanga, looking out over a rural valley. My wife says, “I could live here.” I nod.
High over Oahu, my wife and I kiss, falling through the air as ocean, surf, beach, and jungle rush toward us.
The scene in the skylight changes to a leafless acacia tree backlighted with a brilliant purple, red, yellow sunset. The colors fall beneath the horizon, erasing the tree and sky.
There is a full moon centered now. Blackness washes rapidly from right to left with the frenetic beat of my heart.
The new moon is replaced with the full starry splendor of the Milky Way painted with a sparkling broad brush across the skylight night.
My heart stops.
Each star winks out to black in complete silence.
-----------------------------
“In a flash” was inspired by the poem “Hope”
Hope
by Ricki T. Thues - 1973
it happened when i died
it took my mind some time to grow accustomed
to the dark
i stared and watched and waiting rummaged through the list
of life excuses
-- how love-filled soul would live.
i half expected angels or cosmos continuum or dull non-existence.
the darkness cleared ...
i saw soft satin skies like cloud covered horizons.
with almost expert lace work, i saw stylish suited limbs
and cardboard shoes
and hundreds of inchworms
consuming everything.
