Goddess

David Hovgaard

davidhovgaard1@gmail.com

POB 32430 San Jose CA 95152

Goddess

By

David Hovgaard

August 6 2020

He remembered the popsicle melting in the hand of a child. It was a bright sunny day. She was someone he knew a second ago or was it a hundred years. He couldn't remember exact dates or when was now. Because it didn't matter. 

He was there on that day and he was here now had always been there and here. Had always been everywhere because time was just a possibility and all possibilities were equally valid somewhere. 

He stopped moving again this was his world or not his world similar but different. He'd traveled here not as a body but as a thought or the essence of a thought. This was a body like his because this was him or someone like he was in his world before all this happened, before he threw a switch and found himself adrift. 

Now he saw her the woman he'd lost and went searching for. She was there her dark hair and darker eyes. Her perfect skin and the scent of her womanhood that he'd missed since her death and wanted like a breath after almost drowning. He had wanted her to live again and here she was. 

She was dead the woman he met loved and married just two years before, a type of aggressive metastatic cancer they called it. In six months, she was gone. 

They had barely had time to really get to know one another having met and married in a brief two-month courtship that had stunned his family. They never thought a forty something research fellow would ever find anyone that he was more interested in than his work.

After the funeral he didn’t eat often and he slept less. He spent his hours at Donovan state park five miles from the condo they had bought together. He walked the trails they had hiked thinking of what he was going to do without her. One day he was in an even greater funk than usual. He was angry at the universe and any gods that might exist in the black that he lost track of where he was going and ended up in a part of the forest that was not well traveled. He tried to retrace his steps but he couldn’t remember from which direction he had come and the canopy was so overgrown that he could not even see the sun. 

He panicked for a moment and then remember his phone. He used it to find his way back to the more familiar paths. On the way out he got an idea. What if like the many trails in the forest there were as was suggested by some models many universes and if he could travel there. Even if he only did it as energy maybe he could see her again. True it wouldn’t be her exactly but it would be some form of her and if he could find a way to stay in that universe maybe they could find again what her death had cost them. 

He took a leave of absence from the university and began the work; research was the first step. He read every book and treatise on the multiverse theory. He looked up his old professor Norman Brooks. He bought Norm dinner and wrung everything her could out of the old fellow. Naturally Norm thought him daft. The idea of traveling to another universe was the stuff of science fiction, not science fact but for a free meal and some good wine and later some really expensive scotch, Norman brought him up to date on the various avenues of research that were being pursued into the different versions of the multiverse theory.  

Once he had an idea of how to build a stable portal, he began to gather the necessary parts. He sold the condo. Luckily it was an up market so he made a small profit which he plowed into the project. He was able to rent a small warehouse adjacent to the cities port. The first few attempts to create a stable gateway failed miserably but eventually he was successful. 

His first attempt put him into the body of his younger self. He was still in college decades from meeting her. He jumped back and tried again and again each time not finding the right time or even the right place. In one universe he never went to college and instead worked as a machinist in an auto parts factory. 

He was grateful that his next few jumps brought him closer to the right age and in the right profession to meet her. Then something went wrong. He jumped into himself as a boy but he couldn’t jump back. 

He was stuck. He lived for years as his younger self uncertain how to get back or if there was anything left to get back to. His body was in stasis so time would not move for it while he was traveling but what if something had gone wrong and the stasis had failed. There would be nothing to jump back to his original body would have long ago succumbed to a lack of water. 

So, he lived parts of his childhood over again. He lived through the embarrassment of being a tween up to and including a trip to the zoo when he was eleven. He had been so frightened by some older boys that he pissed himself right in front of Wanda Lange the younger sister of Shana the girl he had a crush on. She was holding a melting popsicle in her right hand and she offered it to him because he was crying. 

Then he jumped and now he was looking into the face of the woman whose doppelganger used to be his wife. He was still amazed by her beauty. Her dark hair and darker eyes. Her perfect skin and warm smile that surprisingly turned to anger. 

“You” she suddenly said, “how did you find me?”  

“My love” he started.

“Don’t my love me” she told him. “Explain?”

“You died I couldn’t live without you so I got this idea that if you existed in another universe maybe I could find you.”

“And what live happily ever after” she said sarcastically. 

“Something like that” he told her.

“Not going to happen” she told him.

“Look what we had was fun but it’s over now. You’ve got to learn to let go. I am no longer interested in you. I’ve moved on” she declared in a tone that he had learned during their brief life together meant she was not interested in having this discussion right now or ever.

“But, but” he stuttered her unexpected hostility shocking him into an old speech pattern that he had worked hard to overcome. “What we had was so pp…perfect he finally managed to say.

“We could have that again if I can figure out a way t…to st… st…ay” he finally finished. 

She didn’t answer and in that brief respite from her unexpected anger he noticed their reflections in the mirrored closet doors opposite the bed.  

He had seen that same face every day for over fifteen years. It was the face of a slightly overweight man with a scholastic haircut and a couple days stubble. It was the face of the man he was in this universe. A man she was clearly intimate with as they were in a bedroom his presumably but, it could be hers. So, if this was him or this universes’ version of him and they were lovers how was it that she knew that he wasn’t the person that normally inhabited this body. 

He was about to ask when she spoke again.

“Look I know that it was a shock when I died but these things happen. You’ve got to accept that and leave, just leave. This isn’t your universe and it’s just kind of rude for you to just take over someone else’s body even if they are technically you.”

“How do you know that I am not who I appear to be and how is it, if this is not my universe, that it is yours” he demanded the stutter gone with a sudden twinge of anger caused by her attitude.

“Look there are things you don’t know about me. Things well really that you don’t deserve to know” she told him.

“But I was your husband” he countered. 

“Well, yes you were and I did love you. I loved you all, if it comes down to it but, you were all really just a way to pass the time” she told him?

“I really don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about” he told her.

“It’s not important that you understand it is important that you go. I am done with you. Go find some starry-eyed coed to bonk. Your student aide what was he name oh Terresa, just ask her, she’ll drop her panties.”

“I love you” he said “Well I don’t love you anymore” she told him. Don’t you remember the part of our vows that went unto death do us part” she said with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“Yes” he answered almost robotically.  

“Well I died and it’s time for you to go” she said slamming the palm of her hand into his chest. There was a blinding flash and she was gone. 

Then he felt the weight of his body on a soft surface. He opened his eyes. He could hear the muffled sounds of the harbor through the prestressed concrete walls and the quiet hum of the machines. 

He was back in the warehouse. He pressed the button on the arm of the chair and the field collapsed. He looked at the readout of the chronometer. It had seemed to him that he’d been gone for years but it had only been a day. Did he really see her or was it a dream? As his mind became more aware of his own body and the world around him. He felt a slight stinging sensation on his torso. He unbuttoned the light silk Hawaiian shirt that he had worn for the jump. He looked down between his pecs there was a red mark in the shape of a hand in the center of his upper chest. He reached up with his right hand to feel the area with his index finger. 

He felt the mark. It was slightly warm and raised to the touch. Then he noticed that there was something red and sticky on his thumb and wrist. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed. It smelled like chemically produced raspberry flavoring. He tasted it. It was the remains of popsicle.    

The end