Fiction

The old man sits in the chair looking out of the big picture window at the mountains across the valley. The sunlight, reflecting off the glass chess set, dapples his white hair and throws a spotlight on the ceiling. He likes to believe that his eyes are bright, but the pale silvery rim around his cornea betrays him. The green journal lies in his lap. Probably the last issue he will get. He looks across the valley. The Fairholme range and Grotto Mountain still keep their dusting of snow although this is late April. They rise up massive and permanent against the sky’s infinite steel depths. The great healers. Quantum physics is a lot more interesting than neurology, he thinks. Imagine all that energy radiating out of the rock. But what a time he has lived in! When he started, the science had hardly moved in a hundred years. Look at it now. The advances in the genetics of neuromuscular disease, alone, justify the term revolution. Incredible! The dissection of DNA down to the last molecule, with a wrinkle there, a hole here, and a sudden explosion over there. Presto! The entire range of the muscular dystrophies on the brink of solution.

He looks at the mountains again. High above the peak, a bald eagle straight-wings his way, circling in an eddy, looking for life. His smaller cousin, the osprey, sits in the pines across the river. The beavers are making a nuisance of themselves again, changing the course of the river, of nature, of history. The old man smiles. Hello, friends. Wonder why the plural of physic is not physics. He could have been …