The Book of Feasts & Seasons Read Online Free

The Book of Feasts & Seasons
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science behind it, talk about the nested interaction of probability waves, how time at the submicroscopic level is symmetrical forward and backward: but pretend instead that you live in a world of magic.
    Life is a miracle.
    Life remembers that moment before time began, that zero point before this universe started and after the previous version of this universe collapsed inward on itself, a cosmos crushed into a pinpoint.
    And what of my life? The life of time travel? I am the one who had the memory of that moment thrust upon her. Why me? Why am I the one worm who grew butterfly wings and soared into the eleven dimensions? That answer is complex, and does not concern us now.
    My cosmos is crushed into a pinpoint as I see my love die. I am his wife; here is the ring on my finger; but he is not my husband. His ring is in midair, impaled on a sunbeam from a shattered image of the Virgin Mary saying that all the wine is gone. All gone.
    I look in the past direction, and I remember our talk on that long bus ride. You are well read, and wanted to make something of yourself. You were studying paleontology. You said the ancient beasts were monsters of legend, but real.
    The talk turned to mythology. I remember you saying, 'But why would the moon goddess love Endymion? All he can do is sleep.'
    'Yes, but it is eternal sleep, so he never dies,' I say.
    You shake your head and smile that handsome smile. 'But he never knows her. He is never awake.'
    I whisper then that if she knows he lives, it is enough.
    Why did I select this time for my exile? It was not a hard question: earlier eras did not have the conveniences of modern life, no cool air at the push of a button when it was hot, no electric lights when it was dark, no aspirin for pain, and no anesthesia for childbirth.
    Why no farther in the future you might ask, when everyone is driving flying cars and rockets to cities on the moon? My love, I will not crush your hopes, but that future does not ever come.
    Instead, the farther you go away from the zero point between Postwar America and Pre-Jihad America, what you find is more riots, more dirt, more diseases without cures, atomics used as a fashion statement to advertise religious or political points of view, and no one able to travel or buy without paperwork and identity chips. So many cameras, and so many computers tracking your every move. A woman with no birth certificate cannot travel freely, and I won't wear a veil while walking through the bad section of town.
    The laws against discrimination close all chapels and synagogues. No one tips his hat to a lady. No one holds the door for me. And the music, the pornography, the swearing, the crudeness, the loutishness, all of it gets worse and worse.
    Why did the men of this generation throw everything away? This is the highest point of civilization out of all history. I know. I've looked.
    But even here, there is hatred and violence and death. You would think they would love this nation and this era so much they would never raise their bloodstained hands against each other. But sometimes hate overwhelms love.
    Look farther back into the negative direction, the past. There I am in the Fortress of Limbo with my mothers. She is me, an older version, the me that gives birth to me. She is the other time travelers. I am the only time traveler there is; they are all me. One is dressed in a snappy Nazi uniform of the women's auxiliary, a cigarette in a hold in her shining black leather glove. The next is dressed in the floral skirts and wide brimmed straw hat of a Southern Belle, and girls waiting on her are mulatto, half-negresses, and they are both her slaves and her half sisters. Another version of me is dressed in the colors of Lady Baltimore, and she looks disdainfully at the slaves, since, in her timeline, the British Empire abolished the institution after the Southern Colonies attempted a second rebellion no more successful than the first.
    One problem with being a time traveler is
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