“I wonder”, mused Rupert momentarily, taking time to place a portion of his current subject into mental parentheses, “is it possible that when ALL is known that TIME will cease to exist? If it ceases to exist sometime in the future, does it exist now? If it does not exist now , then is there no future? And if there is no future do I exist Now? Is there a ‘Now’?”
Rupert rarely panicked but he was beginning to fidget and a tic that he had inherited from Great, Great Grandfather Rolf was blinking rapidly, just above the long scar on his right cheek which had been inherited from no one and acquired while valiantly defending Karina last year from the Fourth Street Gang, a gaggle of uncivilized inhabitants of that area between Third and Fifth, just east of Robinson deep within the odiferi=ous bowels of a rapidly dying American city.
Rupert was searching for that momentarily arrested thought, the one which he had so carefully placed into an imagined parentheses in that 8 ¾ hat-sized space between his ears. Apparently Rupert had learned little from this experience of moments ago and had apparently not yet been warned that Time and tide wait for no man; he quickly created a new parentheses.
(“I can/t let Karina see me like this. This thought will return. I am sure of it. There will be another Time.”)
By Lee Broom
From The Precarious Adventures of Rupert and Karina
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