It’s dusk. I am in a line of traffic slowed to five mph. There are easily several hundred of us inching along, brake lights ever more noticeable as night gathers around us. We’re all aware it’s bad by how many emergency lights flash ahead on the right.
Surely some in this line of cars are praying for whoever is having the worst night or last night of their lives. Surely some are complaining about the delay, already stressed and tired and late for wherever they’re going in their gas-hungry boxes. Surely some use the slowdown to change a playlist or answer a text or turn around to comfort a crying baby strapped in the back seat.
Behind several eighteen-wheelers, I can’t see what’s happening till I’m right there at the accident’s jarring tableau.
A woman prone on the pavement.
A uniformed man reaching into ruckled car.
Medics leaping from orderly ambulances into chaos.
I’m still moving at three mph, but a different slow motion takes over. For what must be only a moment it seems I see past and future slide into now. I can’t explain it.
Some glitch in the filter between what we can know and cannot know shows me the injured woman already recovered. I hear her say, improbably, the accident turned her life around.
I see the cop who is waving us along with an orange-nosed flashlight recognize, much later, he will train to be a paramedic. He shakes his head at all the schooling it will take to save lives yet earn half as much. I even see arguments about this with a wife, who holds a small child between them like a wall. I look right in his eyes as I pass and see somewhere in him he already knows this too.
I recognize whoever is trapped in the car has left his body long enough to see Beyond before coming back. It changes him.
Something like an incomprehensible geometry shimmers over the whole scene, illuminating patterns too large and complex for me to comprehend.
This all happens in the seconds it takes me to drive past. Did that really happen? Are these possible futures? Already it seems unreal.
Drivers accelerate, normal traffic flow resumes. I don’t know what to make of any of it. Maybe every second we pass a tableau. Every second we are the tableau.
Laura Grace Weldon 
Beautiful. Thank you.
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Thank you Karla.
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what an interesting piece, Laura. Reminds me to slow down and see everything around me.
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It was strange, that’s for sure, but yes to slowing down.
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Our whole life parades past us every awake moment and yet… what are the occurrences or events that linger or are engraved in our memories? Mostly the hard ones, the unforgettables; the ones that speak to us of the Universe and it’s Creator. In any case, Laura, thanks for sharing the particular event that makes un stop for a short moment to delve on life and marvel at Creation. John B
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I agree, John, the unforgettable are often the most difficult. Thankfully they’re also often the surprising, the beautiful, even the return of something once taken for granted like health or love.
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For all the collective thoughts and states that are set and all that exists in a moment, a particular future would be a consequence of that full comprehensive state, if there is no free will to go against a static fate. Those forces and objects that exist at that moment are like a ball set in motion down a hill: it will reach the bottom unless a butterfly flapping its wings changes an air current and begins the process with other forces to create a tornado that sucks up the ball into the air and lands it into the windshield of an 18-wheel truck.
I can imagine that you did see the future set at that moment. I don’t know the rate at which things change by people’s decisions and whose decisions have the most effect and whose are the most rapid. Some say that the tableau of staged things ends with a deus ex machina.
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You’re right, Doug. If I indeed got a glimpse into a future it was only a possible future, one that might have been most likely at that moment, and a moment later the mathematics of other possibilities would already be at work. Another possibility is that I simply have a vivid imagination…
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There’s another possible twist: you were picking up on their thoughts and making your own surmise. If someone is thinking about robbing a bank so they can go on an extravagant vacation, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are actually going to do it. I prefer that if it had the feel and intensity of truth that you were the winner of the show “Psychic for a Day.” Imagination is so pedestrian.
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Laura, I think you have the spirit of a poet. Spirits communicate with other spirits though we are only partially aware. Poets are more aware. The portal opens sometimes when we are not expecting it.
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I suspect that portal is there for us all, just hard to recognize it. (Coincidentally, my most recent book is titled Portals.)
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And you, too, were changed. How and in what direction remains to be seen.
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True. So far the only change (I can discern) is that I drive less in the evening, but blame that on my eyesight.
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Thank you for sharing! I love when a story unfolds so vividly. It is similar to watching a video or reading a graphic novel, but also different, faster, and more holistic than any sequential art could be. “Tableau” is such a good term for that feeling! This also made me think about RPF (real-person fiction), and that’s a whole big tangle of thoughts and feelings.
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I hadn’t heard of RPF before.
And thank you for illuminating how this bit of real person nonfiction came across to you!
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God speaks to us in mysterious ways. Thank you for sharing. Our lives can be changed by a thought.
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Thank you Debra. And yes, so true.
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Laura, I loved your post and I’ve also enjoyed reading the comments, particularly that there are portals between our world and others, and that honing your skills as a poet may have increased your capacity to see through one of them. I started to comment earlier, and my response grew so long that I turned it into a post on my site and quoted your story there as well. I hope that’s okay.
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Kate, I’m honored that you took the time to write a post prompted by my post. I found myself nodding as I read your words What a neat coincidence, too, that you and I both listened to Dr Jude Currivan being interviewed — I’ve been truly changed by studying the work of Dr. Brian Swimme and her work continues in that vein. A big yes to “Not random. Intelligent.”
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Laura, I loved this post and I also enjoyed reading the comments. I started to comment a few days ago and my response grew so long that I turned it into a post on my site and quoted your story there as well. I hope you don’t mind
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