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The recipe calls for one large tomato, cubed, and somehow that is what sets him off this time.
Something about the way the skin of it—taut and swollen—splits open under his knife; something about the ripeness of it, how firm it is on the outside, but so soft, so delicate, within; something about the way the kitchen is lit, by the setting six o’clock sun; the orange-ness of the light, the red-ness of the fruit.
He slices one into two, and when the two halves fall apart to reveal its cross-section—ye olde poison apple itself—something snaps into place inside his brain, a little jolt of neural activity that connects this moment of slicing tomatoes—here, in his kitchen—with every other moment of slicing tomatoes in his life—all six hundred years of it—and then he remembers slicing tomatoes with Mary, who is gone now, and will never slice tomatoes with him ever again.
The pain that blooms in his chest is so sudden, so overwhelming, that he finds that he can no longer stand, and he sets the knife down so he can put his hands on the countertop to support his weight. But even then it is still too much effort to stay upright, and he crouches, sinking to the floor, then sits, leaning back on the cabinet door, pulling his knees close to his body.
If he could die he might think this was a heart attack, but Hob cannot die, and so this is not a heart attack. It’s just a stabbing ache that comes and goes, but will never truly go away; call it a chronic illness. (Chronic, from the Greek Khronos, meaning time. Yes, his is a disease born of too much time.)
And only time can make it go away now, so he just sits, breathes in deep, and waits for it to pass.
A knock at the door. Hob shuts his eyes, wills whoever is there to go away. Maybe if he’s quiet enough they’ll think no one’s home. He watches the shadow of his half-open blinds form parallel bands of light and dark across the kitchen tile.
Another knock. Hob drops his head onto his knees and thinks about slicing tomatoes with Mary, two hundred years ago. Him with the knife, and her with the book, reading aloud. So many stories she’s told him, Hob still catches himself sometimes reading with her voice in his head. The soft way she formed her ‘t’s, her dropped ‘h’s.
Most days aren’t like this; most days he’s fine, happy to be alive, excited for the future. But moments like these are the price he has to pay—when everything catches up to him, when he is forced to look back instead of forward—and when he sees how far he’s come he also sees exactly how much he’s left behind.
Something shifts in the air; a dense, unnatural wind with no logical source, then a rustling of fabric, and Hob knows who it is before he says a word.
“Hob,” he says, “you did not answer the door.” And so of course he came in anyway. Hob supposes hey Morpheus, do you mind knocking before you come in next time did leave some room for ambiguity.
Hob doesn’t really want to look at him right now, he does not lift his head, mumbles the words with his forehead still on his knees, “this… this really isn’t a good time, Morpheus.”
A moment of silence, then, “I can see that.” His voice is deep and soothing, quiet thunder from distant rains, and Hob can’t find it in himself to be upset at the intrusion, “but you want me to stay.”
Not a question. Not untrue.
“I’m sorry, I’d offer you tea but—I just. I just need a minute, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I can make it myself.”
You don’t tend to notice silence until it is broken. The sound of someone else in his kitchen, taking mugs out of the cupboard, setting them on the counter, sharp clinks, dull knocks, footsteps, water filling the kettle, and then the kettle heating to a boil—it inhabits a vacuum he hadn’t even known was there. This is the music of life being lived, and Hob lets it fill him, the tightness in his chest easing fraction by fraction.
There was no need for him to go about doing this; Hob’s seen the guy pull entire banquets out of thin air. This is for his benefit alone, and the realisation touches him more than he could possibly have imagined.
“Here,” he says, after a while, and when Hob looks over and sees the fresh mug of oolong on the floor next to him, he’s just so, so desperately grateful that Morpheus is still here, six hundred years later.
It is this feeling that pulls him back to his feet, only half aware of his body moving, and when he’s eye-level with Morpheus he finds that his hand has moved too without his knowledge, has wrapped itself around Morpheus’s right wrist. Not tightly, not squeezing or anything, just. There. Outstretched. Holding.
“I—” Morpheus is not human, and his body has the solidity of flesh with the temperature of air. Under Hob’s fingertips, he can feel the tendon that runs from under his palm to the crook of his elbow, and that is a detail he fixates upon, instead of explaining himself. He doesn’t know if he even can explain himself, except that there is an irrational part of him that is convinced that if he lets go Morpheus might disappear too. “I’m so sorry,” Hob says, mortified, but he cannot bring himself to let go.
“It is alright,” his voice is quiet. “You are in pain,” face pinched with something like regret, “I fear there is little I can do to ease it; suffering of this sort—my involvement tends to exacerbate.”
“Can I—” Hob doesn’t know what he’s even asking for, “—can I just—” he’s just standing there, at a complete loss. But Morpheus seems to understand anyway; he nods—a small inclining of his head, and Hob finally lets go of the wrist just to wrap both arms around the entire body, holding everything he can, as tightly as he can manage. So much gratitude and so much grief—joy and sadness—whirling inside him, oscillating between the two so quickly it’s hard to tell what he’s feeling at all.
(A toy Robyn loved when he was a child: a little spinning top, painted in bright hues of red and yellow. When he spun it they melted together into one solid orange disc, and he would watch it spin—in wide-eyed fascination—until it fell, and the colour split itself apart again.)
“Thank you,” he slurs into Morpheus’s shoulder; his oldest friend, still here, then pulling away, a devastating realisation, “Us. This—” he swallows, it’s a thought so terrible it makes him sick, “this won’t last forever, will it?”
Morpheus says nothing for a while, silent in his appraisal, then, “no.” A one-word truth. Hob lets his arms fall boneless back to his side, stepping back to lean his weight onto the kitchen counter.
“...will I ever stop feeling like it could?”
“This idea of forever, in time you will learn to let it go.”
It is solid advice, from one immortal to another. “I think that’ll take me a couple more millennia,” Hob huffs a laugh, “I’ll get there. Someday.” He can’t stop his eyes from welling up. Someday this will be over too.
“But it is not yet the time to grieve, Hob. There is still time, is there not?” We are still here.
“I know,” he chuckles, wiping his eyes with the back of a hand, “I know.” He knows, but also he doesn’t. “It’s just, I always forget it has to end. It always feels like forever, and then it isn’t. I just can’t seem to—can’t seem to get that through my skull. You know me, always a little slow on the uptake.” He grins, self-deprecating, then wipes away fresh tears. “Sometimes, I see something, and I think, it would be really nice if,” he pauses, waits for his throat to untwist itself, “if someone were still here, and I could... show them.”
To his right are two halves of a large tomato, abandoned on the cutting board. For a second he can make out the individual seeds on its exposed insides, before his vision blurs again. “... I had a wife. Her name was Mary.”
“I loved them all, you understand? But she was the first one I told. About me—that I didn’t die.” Wouldn’t. Couldn’t. A gift to be cherished. A sentence to be served. “Fifty-three years, we had. Towards the end I was pretending to be my own son—her son. That was, ah, very strange, let me just say that right upfront.” He shakes his head, remembering how bizarre it was, though at the time it’d made perfect sense. Freud would have had a field day, if he'd been alive back then.
“We had a garden. She planted lilacs, and tomatoes, and sweet peas. She wrote poems. They weren’t very good, but then she got better. I watched her get so much better. I watched her get older, and older. I knew it was coming, but I managed to forget, until it happened.” And here his voice loses all inflection, less a story being told, more a testimony, a report, a list of facts.
“I begged for her to be spared. I’d lost everyone else—I’d lost my son. I thought it was a reasonable request. Just one. She and I never had any children. I just wanted one person,” even now, against all logic, it still feels like an injustice, “I pleaded with the universe, prayed to just about every god I could think of. Not easy, you know, in those days.”
“And then,” he pauses, turns to look Morpheus in the eye, “I met your sister.” If this comes as a surprise to him, he does not show it. But he is still listening, and that’s all Hob really needs from him right now. Hob laughs, humourlessly, “she is really something else, you know that?”
“She is the best of us,” it’s the first thing he’s said in a while, “The kindest.”
“Yes,” the word is barbed and bitter on his tongue, “she is kind.” Hob remembers her face, her smile, her voice, her patience, the gentleness with which she’d held his hand while taking Mary away from him forever. “And she is merciless.” He is wrong for thinking this—he knows, but he is still angry, and his anger will remain as long as his love persists.
“Mercy is not in her domain, Hob. Death was never meant to be retribution. It was humanity that made it so,” there is pain in his expression, for his sister, and for Hob, and for all of humankind. He just feels everything, doesn’t he? “There is no mercy, because there is no punishment.” Not for the dead, no, Hob thinks, but he bites his tongue.
“She said she was sorry,” Hob remembers as if it’d happened just yesterday, and not centuries ago, “she said Mary had to go. But she told me she could take us both, if I wanted to go with her.”
“... you said no.”
“Of course I said no,” Hob doesn’t actually know what compelled him to refuse then. Habit, perhaps. “I had to say no.” There is so much to live for, is what he should say. And it is true; there was. The world kept going, and Hob kept going with it. So much to live for, but in the days following her passing, this was not what he believed, “I had to.”
“You could have said yes, and you would have had the forever you wanted.”
“That is not what it means.”
“Forever, does not exist. It is just a fantasy, but my sister makes it possible; that is her miracle, her gift.” Hob says nothing, but he knows that Morpheus knows that he is entirely unconvinced. “There is no forever, Hob. There is only tomorrow. And when there is no longer tomorrow: that is forever.”
“Fuck off,” Hob says tiredly, not in the mood to decrypt whatever code Morpheus has decided to be speaking in today.
Morpheus politely ignores him, continuing as if uninterrupted, “for Mary, you were there to the end; that was her forever. It was a beautiful gift you gave her, that she sadly could not return.”
There’s a lot Hob can say to that. A lot he wants to say, but he keeps his lips firmly pressed together, does not say a word, because he’s not sure if he can really control what will escape him if he opens his mouth to speak.
Morpheus takes pity on him, “you were busy,” he carefully changes the subject, “when I arrived.” Which is a very generous way to put I saw you having a breakdown on your kitchen floor.
Hob breathes in deep, then out slowly, “yeah I was making some soup for—” he pauses, then exhales a laugh, “for tomorrow.”
He turns to the tomato, “look at the size of this thing, it’s got to weigh at least a pound, I reckon. Isn’t that just unbelievable?” He shakes his head, rinsing his hands before picking up his knife again, slicing a half into two quarters, “It’s mad, I tell you, and there were so many, a whole pile of them, at the store.”
“You can just take them now. They leave everything out, and you just take them. What a world, eh? Sugar—by the kilogram. 60p. And cayenne. Cinnamon—” he gestures helplessly around his kitchen, “there’s just... so much. Too much, sometimes, but,” he dumps the cubed tomatoes into a bowl and starts on an onion. “I wish I could just tell someone how extraordinary this all was. Some things are wonderful, and some things are downright terrible. But none of it is normal, you know? I just want to scream at people to notice. Seat belts—they do that thing, if you pull too hard it stops, but if you pull it gently it doesn’t—how does it do that?” He’d spent so long, in the back of a taxi, pulling at that strip of nylon, utterly bewildered, “how does any of this happen?”
Morpheus just smiles, taking a sip of the tea he’d made himself, “it’s your species, Hob. You tell me.”