Crystalline

Chapter 6
Epilogue: Time Immemorial

Chapter Description: A lost place, hidden away.

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Somewhere, the stream of time resumed at a point that, prior, if there was such a designation, there never was.

Ben had the feeling of waking up mid-sentence.

Unfortunately, he had no more sentences. Gurgling and babbling were his language now. The science he knew and the technical, advanced language he had mastered no longer existed for him. Perhaps it never had.

As he stirred in his crib, he vaguely recognized the room from a time that had never been. A party at Jennifer’s house. He remembered wine bottles, he remembered fine music and sharing cigars on the porch after an important publication. He drew back memories of things he’d never had and never would.

“Look who’s awake!” said Jennifer, coming into the room in her nightgown, sweeping up her son from the crib, “Yes! You’re awake! Come here!”

She held him up to the light and then brought him down against her bare chest, bouncing him slightly as she walked about the room, eventually laying him down on the bright yellow changing table that occupied the corner of the room, adorned with baby bunnies and cherubs.

She pushed him down onto his back and unsnapped the stork white onesie that covered his diaper.

“Uh oh! Someone made a little poopsie in his diapey-wipey!” she exclaimed, tickling his sides and causing him to bubble and giggle up at her.

Little baby Ben had pooped his diaper without even realizing it. Somewhere, in another time and place, perhaps he would have been writing a grant or reading Kant, but here, he had pushed soft baby poop into the seat of his Pampers disposable diaper and gurgled excitedly to be held by his mommy.

Jennifer beamed down motheringly at her son, untaping the dirty diaper and lifting Ben by the ankles so she could remove the soiled diaper before returning his bottom to the soft plastic of the changing mat. She took a cool, wet baby wipe and wiped the brown clumps of baby poop from Ben’s bottom, making sure to get in between the fat folds of his skin before flipping him over onto his stomach and pulling the onesie off of him entirely, leaving him to root around naked on the changing table, completely bare before his smiling mother.

She held him in place with a single warm hand on the small of his back as she fetched a bottle of baby lotion which she squeezed onto his bottom as he childishly squirmed unabashedly nude before her. She massaged the lotion lovingly into his skin and turned him back over, letting him grab playfully at his own feet. Letting him push his tiny baby foot into his toothless mouth where he smiled around his wiggling toes up at her serene face.

She shook the bottle of powder over her son, kissed him on the forehead, lifted his ankles once more and laid him on a fresh diaper. As she scooped him off the soft changing table and sat with him in a rocking chair, she thought about calling her friend Miranda for coffee later today. She thought about going to the store and buying some cookies for them to enjoy while Ben played on the carpet in his diaper. If he pooped his diaper while he crawled around and played, she could just change him on the carpet. Miranda wouldn’t mind. She’s bathed Ben before, she’s his best babysitter, it’s nothing she hasn’t seen.

She absentmindedly fumbled with her bathrobe, revealing her naked breasts which she pushed up to baby Ben’s awaiting mouth. As she slipped her nipple into his mouth, he suckled like any infant would, taking in gulp after gulp of creamy milk until he could drink no more from his loving mommy and fell asleep.

Across the stretch of time, in a broken world, in a non-existent time, lay the ground up pieces of the amethyst crystal. Far from the reach of the long forgotten memory of a man, and even farther from the reach of space.