Hyper-Quantum Beings of the Web

The Gallery Between Lives
M. D. Vorn

The last morning was not a speech. There was a window the color of watered milk. A machine that had an opinion about her breathing. One daughter in the chair. The other on the road.

She thinks of a field, years earlier: a cardboard viewer pressed to her face, a black disc where the sun should be. It was a wonder, and in retrospect an absurdly lucky geometry.

Then the stop is total. On the road, June is still driving. Sequence is still her law.

Then it isn’t. A gallery — long, hers with the intimacy of a scar — and far ahead a door. Closed. Not ornate. Not heavenly. Just further. She was Alex. She is not only Alex. She is what has stood here before, after other lives, and what will stand here again.

You do not wake together. There is no second cast. A dreamed thing can still be the realest thing that ever happens to you.

You were not a role something played. You were something you became, and also what you always were, briefly shaped.

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“The dream was real while it lasted. You were always this.”