Mulligan

The first time through, when everything is new and immediate, Ora marries and has three children. The first dies from drowning in their crashed car, his body still trapped inside the pressurized cabin. The second child falls in a war, his blood spilling on foreign ground. Her marriage doesn’t survive the second death, and her husband retreats to his family on the East Coast. The baby survives, but she’s never been quite right. As an adult, she spends her days writing poetry about serial killers. Ora’s death comes at one of her daughter’s book signings. A disgruntled, violent crime survivor tries to execute the daughter-poet, but she misses. Ora dies with the sound of her daughter’s name spoken as a curse ringing in her ears.

—X—

The second time through, when Ora wakes in a cold sweat, she figures it was all a nightmare. She marries, has children. The first she teaches urban survival and safety tricks. She gifts him with a seat belt cutter with an end designed for window breaking. It saves his life, and Ora whispers a silent prayer of thanks even as a chill streaks down her spine.

Her second born still yearns for adventure, so she teaches him how to shoot from a very young age. She hopes that his skill with a firearm will help keep him alive. It doesn’t. He falls earlier, called to the frontline for his marksmanship. Ora tries not to stoop under the weight of guilt she carries.

When she gets pregnant a third time, she has it aborted.

Years later, an unrealized complication of that procedure causes an embolism to travel to her brain, dropping her instantly in the frozen food aisle of a Kroger.

—X—

The third time, Ora marries and has three children. She raises the first, who does not die trapped in his car, but who calls his mom to thank her for the gift of the window breaker. She raises the second one encouraging him toward gentleness and casting the outside world in a fearful light. It works and he stays home. The third child graduates from zapping ants with a magnifying glass to poisoning the neighbor’s cat. She never told Ora why she stabbed her brother to death with a pair of gardening shears, only that he bled a lovely cardinal red on grey bedspread.

—X—

The fifty-fourth time, Ora marries, has four children, and divorces her husband shortly after the last birth because of his constant infidelities. She teaches the first one survival and the second one the healing arts of medicinal herbs. The first survives and the second becomes a doctor. The third she teaches poetry and gardening. Pets are forbidden in their house, but plants are everywhere. Ora tries to show her the value in every living thing. The fourth is a quick witted, but quiet girl. The third one grows up to live from paycheck to paycheck as a landscaper, but the fourth is more driven and becomes the youngest recipient of the McArthur Award. She throws herself off the Bay Bridge days later, leaving a message that apologizes for the inconvenience of finding someone to take her shift in the graduate teaching rotation.

The third one blames Ora for her sister’s death. When Ora is admitted into the hospital a year later with gallstones, it is the third one that puts an air bubble in her IV.

—X—

By the 345,474th time, Ora decides to stop counting. Numbers are meaningless. Her actions are meaningless. Her first child dies, or he doesn’t. The second child leaves home or he doesn’t but is always murdered. The third child is a killer, or she is killed. The fourth child, when she’s born, always burns brightly and too fast.

—X—

One time, Ora becomes the killer. Her second child, a police officer, shoots her in the head when she refuses to be apprehended.

—X—

One time, Ora doesn’t wait. She cancels her date with her husband-not-husband-would-be-husband. Instead, she goes to a nearby bridge and jumps.

—X—

Ora loses count. Deaths blend together. Successes are forgotten. Failures are repeated.

—X—

Ora learns to become reckless. She abandons the idea of love and family. She isolates herself from the connections of community. She skydives, races cars, swims with sharks. Adrenaline junky, they call her. But only Ora knows that she can’t die, not in a way that matters. So instead, she seeks adventures and ignores risks. People around her die or are injured because of her careless actions, and they are careless. She Does Not Care. Because it Does Not Matter.

—X—

Innumerable cycles later, Ora admits that she is lonely. She craves people. She craves family. She has forgotten the harsher hurts of past cycles. So, when the rock ledge breaks under her feet and she falls into the erupting lava flow of supposedly inactive caldera, Ora dreams of a small house filled with laughter and children.

To read a plain text version of A.S. Lewis’s fiction piece, “Mulligan,” click here.