It wasn’t now anymore. That wasn’t quite right. Ruth struggled to wrap her mind around it. It wasn’t the now that she remembered. She wasn’t when she thought she was. She looked at the picture in her hand and gave up. Thinking about it made her head hurt.
Ruth stared out the window of the hospital room in which she had awakened a few days prior. The doctors said she was lucky to be alive. Ruth wasn’t so sure. She picked up the picture again. That was definitely her, but a much older her. And that man in the picture, and the two kids. Her eyes slid away from them to the tree outside her window. It was much safer to look at.
The last thing Ruth remembered was Josh proposing after their high school graduation. She had awakened here with a strange man crying in a chair beside her bed. He claimed to be her husband. He claimed she was twenty-eight years old and a mom. Only that couldn’t be right. She was going to marry Josh. Where was Josh?
Ruth didn’t want to believe it but the mirror and the picture both said the same thing. She wasn’t eighteen anymore. The doctors said she’d suffered a brain injury when a drunk driver had crashed into her car at an intersection. It had made her forget her family.
“You might regain some, or even all of your memory,” Dr. Anderson had said. “There’s no way to know at this point.”
The man who was supposed to be Ruth’s husband—Jerry, he said his name was—was coming back in a few hours with the children. The doctors hoped seeing them might jog her memory. The thought terrified Ruth. She jumped at the sound of the door swishing open. Not yet. She couldn’t face it yet.
But it wasn’t Jerry with the kids. Ruth cried out with relief as her mother rushed to her bedside. Ruth threw her arms around her. “Mom,” was all she could get out through her tears.
When the two women finally pulled apart, Ruth could see her mother looked older too, her hair graying, and wrinkles beginning to crease her face. “It’s true, then? I’m really married with kids?”
“You’re a wonderful mother,” Mom said.
“But I don’t remember. How can I…”
“It will be okay. Maybe you’ll remember. But even if you don’t, you’re raising two amazing children. You’ll love them no matter what.”
“And what about Jerry?”
Ruth’s mother took her hand and looked her in the eye, a familiar gesture. “He’s a good man, Ruth. If you don’t remember him, he’ll wait. He won’t push you. I think you’ll fall in love with him again. And if you don’t, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Ruth felt like she could breathe again. Jerry wasn’t going to push her to be a wife to him. To a man she didn’t know. She picked up the picture, looking closely at the children. The boy looked like her. The girl took after Jerry. This wasn’t the now she remembered. But it was the now she had to learn to live in. These children—her children—would be here in a few hours. They needed their mother.
Ruth set the picture down, turning to her mom. “Tell me about them.”
Laura started this story off with the prompt, “It wasn’t now anymore.” I really thought I’d write a science fiction story when I saw this one, but that wasn’t where the story took me.
This captured the total feeling of disorientation I felt when the prompt came to me. Not the same circumstance, of course, but looking around and thinking that I wasn't where I was supposed to be. I was so young when I planned my life but a flash of realization that it wasn't that now, not anymore. Releasing old dreams, embracing new ones. Wonderful!
Great microstory, could be the beginning of a novel.