She wipes her foot across the wet sand erasing a triangle someone has etched into the mud with a stick. Finding a stick of her own, Yolanda replaces the triangle or delta with a long integral ∫. It was the delta that initially attracted her to calculus. The delta is the mathematical representation of rates of change, but tonight’s ritual is all about the past. The integral reverses the derivative, in this case symbolically reversing her history. She draws a sigma next. For she’ll need the sum total of the variables working for her, even the marks on the sand.
The letters for the variables . . . t for time? The hours between sunset on Halloween and the end of Dia De Los Muertos. She’s piggy backing on the shared belief that the veil is thinnest these two nights, this night specifically since there are more unwitting participants, the greater the effect. She is x in the equation. The observer is part of the ritual. She giggles. How’s that for an Uncertainty Principle? There must be a variable for place, as she fully believes this ritual can only work here, the city that substitutes so often for so many other places.
A man with an unbuttoned shirt and his pant legs rolled up to his knees, stands in the surf ahead. She follows the trail of hair up his chest, neck, and muttonchops, and realizes that he is staring back at her.
His eyes are bloodshot, but his pupils are as immense and saucer sized as her own. She’s certain that the spirit staring at her is a young, Los Angeles-years Jim Morrison. And he should stare at her, for she is the L.A. Woman. She is Los Angeles. Born to a Hispanic mother and a half-Korean half-African American father, she worked two jobs while going from LACC to UCLA to grad school at Cal Tech, all while painting and working theater crews and never ever sleeping. She grew up on this beach and in traffic between this beach and her parents’ home in Boyle Heights. She’s seen the absurd wealth in the estates just blocks from people sleeping beneath overpasses. She’s seen her streets double for countless other cities on the movie and television screens. If anyone would know that the barrier between worlds is thinnest in Los Angeles, it’s her.
Los Angeles, Halloween night, she has her coordinates in space time.
She feels the pull of a thousand dark suns as she’s drawn into Morrison’s eyes. But before her vision is engulfed in the black of those immense pupils there’s a light, yellow and pink, she realizes it’s the sun reflected off the waves in front of her. There’s no sign of the man she thought was Morrison’s spirit, it’s faded like so many shades before her, leaving the trace of cigarette smoke on the wind.
How long has she been staring at the ocean? How long has it been since the spirit passed her by? Maybe she shouldn’t have eaten all three-and-a-half grams of the mushrooms. No. She shakes her head and the world shakes in jangled frames in front of her. It had to be the whole eighth and it had to be tonight.
It can’t be as long as it seems. The sun is still above the horizon, if only just. She trips out on its flicker across the waves, but forces herself to stop and concentrate for one moment. The time dilation effect is a double-edged sword. It buys her more time to think and to explore, but there’s the danger that she could forget her task, get too buried in the rite to remember its purpose.
That’s just one of the dangers. Every time she’s taken psychedelics there’s been that fear in the back of her head, the one where she worries this is the time it lasts forever, this is the time she doesn’t come back. And it’s more important not to give power to that fear tonight, with the greater effects of the ritual, she doesn’t want her own mind to give her power over to any of the dangers. With the barriers between worlds down, there’s the rift wraiths to contend with, and not all the spirits she’ll encounter will be friendly, and of course she needs to do all she can to not mess with Mr. In Between.
She shakes her head like she can rattle the notion out through her ear. At least she went with mushrooms instead of LSD. She’s taken enough chemistry to know she prefers the simple organic compounds over the complex chemicals.
Several chemical formulas are etched into the sand underneath her integral ∫. She realizes she’s giggling before she knows what she’s laughing at. Trying to be consistent while mixing weird mathematics with magical ritual. Do the formulas work as well as her tia claimed? Jack Parsons sure thought so when he combined magic with rocketry, and he didn’t have half the math available to him that she does. He didn’t have half the theory of the multiverse, or of the simulation nature of the universe. He did understand that belief informs reality, but he could not have understood the importance of this location on this night.
Or did he? The man was a black magician as well as a rocket scientist. He cofounded JPL. Was there a reason JPL was founded on Halloween?
She wonders if she made her way back to Pasadena if she’d see his shade there. He blew himself up not too far from where she lives today.
There are plenty of spirits out on Halloween night through to the end of Dia De Los Muertos, but Yolanda is looking for two in particular.
Shades move past her in the windswept sand, but none of them are her parents. She’d hoped to find them here, in an echo from their time together at the beach from her childhood, but no such luck. If she can find them, will they be able to tell her what she should do? Should she stay where she is and take the job she wants researching, or take the better paying engineering job and have to move away? If she stays, her life will be beset with costs she can never afford. If she leaves she will miss her home and will forever wonder if what might have been if she’d remained in academia. Security or achievement. And of course there’s the fear of leaving Los Angeles. For all its faults, it’s her home, and it’s a city with more to offer her than anywhere else. She’s thought about it for so long, she just wishes that she didn’t have to choose.
She hoofs it up the road. It’s hard to tell some of the more opaque spirits from the living people she sees. People, especially the fast moving little ones already out in their costumes, smear and blur past as the mushrooms do their work, leaving bright trailers behind. Peering harder, she can tell the shades from the people by their faded colors.
Yolanda passes the Abbot Kinney Library, and he’s there out front, the founder of Venice By The Sea, he tips his hat to her as she passes.
A trio of jack-o’-lanterns are on the top step. The tall one has the sideways eight, the infinity symbol carved into its forehead. The magician jack-o’-lantern. The other two have spirals for eyes, reminding her of the Indian petroglyph she’s always assumed means gate or portal. She’s on the right path.
Birds chatter around her. No. It’s the cackle of seven, eight, then nine small children. Tiny ghosts and goblins parading the street, encircling her and dancing around her like a May Pole. This is not Beltane, this is on the opposite side of the linear time axis. She’d be stunned that they’re so fearless with a stranger, but she realizes this too is part of the rite. Even on a standard Halloween the children practice the sympathetic magic of transformation when they don their costumes. At the doorsteps of their neighbors, the children recite the evocation of the spell with “Trick or Treat” and they are rewarded with sacrifice in sugar.
She passes two shades, definitely not with the trick or treaters. One she’s certain is Pio Pico, the last governor of Alta California. The other is an African American woman. Is that Biddy Mason? Or is Yolanda’s hero worship of Mason’s history playing on the psilocybin and the disorienting overall nature of the rite? Is this confirmation bias in action?
“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you Biddy Mason?” she hears her own voice say. It’s a shock to her. Did she mean to speak? If she’s just hallucinating and she’s said this to a random stranger how embarrassing would that be?
The woman smiles kindly. When she speaks it’s barely audible, a whisper on the wind. “It doesn’t matter, does it, dear? You can’t let yourself be distracted along the way. If I learned anything, it’s that you need to be focused on what you really want.”
Before Yolanda can ask another question, the woman fades to shadow. The ghosts of Los Angeles rise and fall and rush away like the white foam of a broken wave.
Yolanda looks up to see that her bus has arrived. She steps onto the 33 Downtown and is surprised that she has the fare already in hand. Maybe the spell is stronger than her. She’s not sure if that’s a good thing.
***
The Central Library is Yolanda’s favorite building in the world. The mosaics on the outer walls and busts of great thinkers symbolize the theme of the light of learning. Climbing the steps many times she’s felt the power growing around her, coming closer into the building that embodies not just learning as a goal and concept but also a wondrous architectural achievement, a symbol of what society can do when they’re motivated by the public good more than individual greed.
As she forces herself to walk past the steps, to continue tonight’s mission, she wonders if she should have spent more time inside prepping for the evening. Is she knowledgeable? Isn’t the thing she learns most often when she researches, how much there is she doesn’t know? An equation appears on the wall in front of her, glowing in hot red, the limit as K approaches infinity. K must be knowledge. She wonders if the rest of the equation is research or her ability to understand it, then she shakes it off and tries to maintain her focus on her purpose. There is little time. It has to be tonight.
If she does meet the spirits of her parents, does she have the question worded properly? Will she make the most of the situation, or will she stammer or confuse them until they can’t provide her with any help after all?
Her parent’s first apartment was in Korea Town. She wades through crowds of drunks stumbling out of restaurants and bars. She waves her hands to balance herself as if she’s surfing an imaginary wave and bending the board around the rocks coming up fast ahead. No not rocks, loose jack-o’-lanterns bouncing and twirling levitated ahead of her. That can’t be real, she tells herself, but whether she believes or not, she takes the time to find the one with the infinity symbol etched in its forehead to make sure she’s on the right path.
A thousand separate bird chirps chatter around her. She covers her ears. Too many voices at once as the crowd thickens.
This is nothing. If things go badly she’ll have to brave the multitudes in Hollywood. The thought sends a shiver down her spine. She’s not ready for that. A Hollywood Halloween Night while she has a head full of mushrooms.
This crowd is bad enough.
“The overlay of the worlds, tonight that barrier is the lowest.” The voice sounds familiar, but she can’t place it in the crowd.
“Is it tonight that it’s lowest, or is it the belief that makes it so?”
“Does it matter in practicality?”
The first voice is her physics professor from UCLA, but she doesn’t see him in the crowd, certainly not close enough to hear him speaking. The second voice sounds a lot like her own, but older, merged with her tia’s? It seems like there’s something she’s forgotten, probably she should consider how many mushrooms she ate on the beach, but no, that’s not it. She’s sure of it.
As if they know she’s trying to concentrate on them, the voices die back down to dull crowd murmur.
Olvera Street to her left is home to some of Los Angeles’ most famous and oldest ghosts, but she keeps moving. It’s her folk’s apartment she needs to check out, her last chance at sparing herself the chaos of Hollywood on Halloween Night.
A man in an out of fashion suit wearing a hat stands in front of her.
“My walks are beset with difficulties. It was easier before the freeways. How can I hope to find Cissy now?”
She looks over her shoulder, but the shade is definitely speaking to her. “I guess we’re all looking for someone. Is Cissy still among the living?”
He stops and ponders and flickers as the realization passes over him. “No. She passed before I did. I died, and far from here. What am I doing back on these streets?”
“I think it’s an echo. I think it’s unique to Los Angeles, and possibly elevated by the Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos traditions.”
“Los Angeles is unique. Thank the Gods for that. At least the Santa Anas aren’t blowing in force tonight. I’ve said it before, on nights like those, every party ends in a fight.” He stops walking and smiles at her.
Or so she thinks. She turns around to see who he’s really smiling at, but there’s just the empty sidewalk leading down 7th Street.
“Is that the Athletic Club? At least some things never change. It’s been so many years . . . I hope you find who you’re looking for.”
She looks back to see if she can read the text over the door, but it’s too far and she’s at too sharp an angle. She turns back around, but the spirit of the man is gone.
Yolanda spins in place and realizes she’s come off the beaten track and into an alleyway. Spirals the same as the petroglyphs are etched into the sides of the alley dumpsters. But because they’re on either side of her, she’s not sure which way to go.
The dumpsters start to shake. After a moment the three closest to her are hopping around like an unbalanced washing machine. Wind swirls forming a cyclone of rubbish, and an unearthly howl roars from the sky above. Black smears pinwheel in smoke on the alley walls. The temperature drops around her and the howl jumps up an order of magnitude of decibels. The ground shakes and car alarms blare in the distance, but the shaking feels less like an earthquake and more like an oncoming train.
She picks a direction and sprints away, unsure of what she’s running from precisely, but she doesn’t stop and she doesn’t turn around to look and find out.
***
Yolanda’s surprised to find that she’s able to cope with so many people around, despite the mushrooms. She’s not sure it will last. Her fear may grow and the shadows that chased her here may grow braver, but for now, the teeming multitude of celebrants seem to be holding the darkness at bay.
The first Ishtar Gate in Los Angeles was built for D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance. Like many landmarks from Hollywood’s earliest films, it stood in place for decades until it fell into disrepair and had to be torn down. According to the author Ray Bradbury, rebuilding it to its present height as part of a shopping mall was his idea.
Yolanda stares at the gate now. On a night like this more than shoppers are likely to travel through such a thing.
The shadows seem to sense this. They scurry around the periphery of the Halloween crowd, flickering in and out of the light, until they glom onto the wall of the gate and instead of an empty space at the bottom a purple reflection starts to shimmer into being.
Yolanda’s not sure what’s coming, but she knows she’s not going to stick around to find out. She takes off down the side street and keeps running until the crowd starts to thin, but then she realizes she’s vulnerable to the shadows and she ducks into a diner. The place is packed, but a man with a scruffy goatee and a Porkpie hat, waves at the empty seat on the other side of the table from him.
Something about him looks familiar. She’s seen him on album covers, a younger version of one of her favorite musicians. She stammers, “Aren’t you . . . ?”
He nods and exhales tobacco. She’s sure no one was smoking when she came in. “I am.”
“But . . . You’re not dead.”
“No. Not the version of me in your present day. But the spirits you speak to, it’s not the same as speaking to the dead. It’s just memories. And this memory of this time is just as gone to you as any of the dead. Past versions of yourself are just spirits now, maybe more accessible to you because you remember them the best. Oh yeah you could talk to past versions of yourself tonight. Future versions too, but don’t think about it too much. In your condition you might just bodhisattva out of control and fill the diner with a horde of yous. And then I’ll never get a refill.” He holds his coffee mug up in the direction of the waitress.
A waitress with a chain clipped to her rhinestone glasses lopes to the table carrying a coffee pot. Her nametag says “Irene.” She doesn’t take Yolanda’s order or even acknowledge her presence. The moment she finishes pouring the coffee she fades away into nothingness.
“I’m dead.” A young man with short-cropped hair materializes on her right.
“You’ve no one to blame but yourself for that, Darby.” Her favorite singer in the porkpie hat grins and takes a big gulp of his coffee.
“But if we’re stuck in the 70s, shouldn’t I be alive?”
“Memory is as unstable as reality, particularly tonight. Things overlap. That’s sort of the point.”
Yolanda smells something. Could be spoiled bacon, but no, she looks more closely at the young man next to her and discovers that he’s putting out a cigarette on his arm.
“Knock that shit off, Darby. No one cares. No one’s interested in your crap. You got to grow up.”
“I never did. I thought that was my point.”
Their bickering fades into the background. The chatter of the diner, clank of silverware hitting plates, and the hiss of the coffee maker take over as Yolanda ponders growing up. Has she ever grown up? If so, why does she need so badly to speak to her parents? Hasn’t she learned enough? And if not, why is growing up so important anyway?
She’s not sure when she stops talking to the two men, if she left the diner first, or if they did, but by the time she’s stopped thinking about the singer’s words, she’s bewildered to find herself sitting on another bus. Streetlights warp past. The brakes squeal and the door opens.
The spirit of the singer she likes is in the driver’s seat. “I’m afraid this is where you get out. You see, I have to be making a turn up ahead.” He chuckles and mutters something to himself she can’t quite hear.
She knows better than to ask. She steps off the bus, turns in place to get her bearings. She’s near her tia’s home in East L.A. When she turns back to the street, she watches the bus evaporate into mist in the intersection ahead.
***
Walking up Whittier Boulevard, the street is oddly empty apart from a lone shade standing in front of a Christian Church. The spirit of a middle aged Latino man nods to her as she walks by. “All I wanted was a cold beer. Now the Silver Dollar Bar is a church. No chance I’ll ever get that beer, I suppose.”
“Not here anyway.” She shrugs. She wonders if the spirit is tied to this spot. She doesn’t even consider who he is until she realizes that she’s passed that church before and there’s a plaque on the front wall honoring the memory of journalist, Ruben Salazar, killed at the Silver Dollar Bar by the L.A. Sheriffs.
She turns back and watches as he fades away. “Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change again.” His image is gone before his words dissipate to silence.
Her tia’s door is open when she gets there. At first she worries that the shadows have beaten her here, but then she catches the first whiff of incense and hears 70s punk playing on the jukebox, and she knows the old woman is home, enjoying the night.
Light flickers from the twenty-three candles stacked on the ofrenda between the foyer and the entryway to the living room. Five candles on the bottom shelf, ten on the next, three with the pictures of Yolanda’s mother and grandmother. Five more on the next shelf, and ten in front of the pictures of the two people most important to her tia. In place of the traditional Virgin Mary or saints, the top shelf holds pictures of Frida Kahlo and Alice Bag.
“Why are you here? This is the one place you cannot find what you seek.”
She hadn’t counted on this. It hadn’t occurred to her that the woman who has helped her the most in her life wouldn’t be receptive to aid her now, but maybe she should’ve known that when her tia had given her the recipe for the rite, but hadn’t offered to help her perform it that she’s meant to do it herself. “But I need help.”
“Once you started the quest, what more help can I offer?”
“They’re after me. I think.”
It’s clear her tia knows which “they” she means without her having to say so. Or did she? Yolanda’s not sure which words came out of her mouth. Her tia frowns and winces as she thinks aloud. “You’ve been warned not to empower them with such thoughts.”
“I didn’t think that I did.”
Her tia moves past her toward the door. She shuts it and locks the deadbolt first. The next lock is a clockwork mechanism. A five pointed star sparkles over the face of it when she finishes winding it. “They’ve followed you here. We only have a few minutes.”
Yolanda steps into the kitchen to peer through the window. A similar five-pointed star is etched into the glass. The smoky wraiths, black as the night, trace back and forth in front of the star, occasionally darting at it before reeling back again.
“The rift wraiths are an ever present danger when we approach the barriers. But there is worse. They serve much worse. Now, why have you come?”
Gravity comes and goes in waves under Yolanda’s feet. She could graph its intensity versus time and it would be a perfect parabola or maybe a cosine. She looks back to her tia and realizes that she hasn’t answered the question. “I can’t find them. I’ve looked for mom and dad everywhere I remember being with them, but they’re not there.”
“The goal of your ritual still eludes you?”
“Unless you can answer for them. What do I do? Do I leave the city? Take the job I don’t want because it pays better? Or do I take the job I want, stay here where it costs more, but I’ll earn less?”
“If I had the answers you want, you would not have gone through the trouble to see through the barriers between worlds.”
“But they’re not here and I still need an answer.”
Her tia looks over her shoulder as the glass on the windows rattles. “We have so little time. Three cards of the tarot? Past, present, and future?” She moves to the kitchen table. The table cloth is covered in scattered ash from the incense, beeswax from candles, and coins from a ritual that Yolanda does not recognize.
Her tia clears a space on the cloth and hands Yolanda a small bag containing the cards. “Ask your question and shuffle the cards.”
Yolanda does as she says. She takes the top card and places it in front of her.
“The Queen of Wands. The black cat symbolizes her protector. She is passionate, she is accomplishing her goals.”
“But that’s my past.”
“Yes, it could be that these are what you find lacking in your life. Are you without passion, mija? Is that why you dwell on the past? You’ve lost your path and are looking to find where you went off it?”
Yolanda shakes her head, though she’s not so sure. It’s hard enough for her to think about these things without a head full of mushrooms, not to mention the weird mathematics, and the collision of worlds from both the holiday and the magic of Los Angeles. She tries to put the lid down on the million separate thoughts firing through her head as every stray neuron attempts its own unique investigation, and she flips the next card.
“It would appear so. The Hanged Man. A life in suspension. You may just need to let go. To let yourself fall so you can set about achieving what it is you want.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. I’ve always wanted to find out all I can, but sometimes I get stuck. And I just want to ask them why? I just want to hear them once more tell me that I can do anything if I set my mind to it.”
“Child, how can you not know that they would say this if they were here? Don’t you know that they’re proud of everything you’ve accomplished?”
Yolanda understands but she can’t accept it. She wants to see the future. She wants to see the last card. As she starts to flip it, glass shatters from the kitchen and the temperature in the house drops twenty degrees in the blink of an eye.
The black smoke sweeps in accompanied by a howl so loud, Yolanda’s ears sting despite her attempting to muffle them with her hands.
Her tia tries to rise from her chair. She raises her hands and starts to chant, “En el nombre de Kahlo y Bags salir de este lugar!” Before she can say it a second time, the shadow blast hits her, and she’s knocked back into the wall so hard her chair bursts and her head dents the drywall. A tempest swirls through the living room, picking up and twisting the debris. Yolanda backs away, but the shadows pick her up and swoop her towards the mirror over her tia’s couch.
It draws her in at what seems like thousands of meters per second.
Yolanda puts her arms over her eyes to protect her from the glass that’s sure to break when she hits, but instead she and the shadows go right through, and blackness surrounds her.
***
When her eyes focus and the world stops swaying around her, she finds herself in a place she does not recognize. Desert? It’s rocky around her with dry brush leading to a clearing. The hills on either side are riveted with ruts eroded by fast moving water in the distant past. The smoky shadow wraiths swarm and swirl into a cyclone and then dissipate revealing a man in a black tuxedo and carrying a cane.
“Mr. In Between?”
He smiles revealing teeth so white that they glare in the darkly lit vale and reflect off the pool of inky blackness in front of him. “I see you already know me. Introductions, I suppose, aren’t necessary.”
“Why have you brought me here?”
“I think you know that, too.” The darkness around her vibrates and shimmers into a deep purple. The temperature drops and rises again, matching the cadence of his words, and causing Yolanda to sweat and shiver in rapid succession.
“No. I don’t.”
“You’ve been here for ages. You didn’t start out here. But lately more and more of you resides here. I’m starting to think it’s time to charge you rent. Or to begin your apprenticeship.”
“Apprenticeship?”
“The way you’re going? Or rather not going, I can’t think of a better Mrs. In Between.”
Yolanda realizes her jaw has dropped. She starts to giggle, can’t believe who she’s giggling at, and then starts to laugh all the harder. “This is the weirdest proposal I’ve ever had.”
“Oh I know you won’t accept. It’s too big a change. But you won’t go anywhere either. You can’t. You’ll just linger here until we both wither away in the wind, sun, rain. Your indecision will be measured in geologic time.”
“You’re wrong.” She shakes her head and tries not to lose focus, but there’s a light in the distance, a lone spot of white in all the darkness around her. It pulsates and then explodes into a thousand separate lights before contracting, withdrawing back to darkness. Yolanda worries she’s forgotten something, and then realizes all this has taken place in no time at all, it’s just the mushrooms. She’s only just stopped telling him he’s wrong.
“Oh, please. I recognize it when I see it. It’s like staring into a mirror.”
“Didn’t you have to change to become who you are now?”
“Probably. But who can remember if there was another Mr. In Between. As far as you’re concerned, I have always been here before. And you’ve always been here. Always in this action state. Whether you realized it or not.”
“No. If I’ve learned one thing about the past, it’s that I was different. I was always changing. I was always improving. If I have to go back to move forward I will.”
He twirls his cane, tosses it in the air and catches it like a drum major leading a parade. “Ha! You will? All you’re going to do is stay uncommitted and uncertain. Look at you, you’re already rationalizing that if you can’t go back, you’ll stay right where you are.”
Yolanda shakes her head. “No. You’re wrong. I’ve had enough.” She feels like she can’t breathe. She wonders if it’s the air here, panic, or more likely the mushrooms giving her stomach problems.
“You’ve had enough for a long time. It hasn’t done you any good.” The smile curls up and then back down into a frown. “Why are you so sure it’s different this time?”
“Because I’m ready to take the plunge.” Yolanda dives into the black pool. It’s icy as hell, and for a moment she thinks she’ll sink forever and drown, but she bobs up in the surf, and catches a wave, bodysurfing to the shore at the beach where she started the evening.
***
She’s sat on the beach so long the sun’s come up again. She wonders if she ever left the beach, if the whole night has been a hallucination-fueled trip on the sands until she ended up in the water, but that’s probably too rational, and she doesn’t want to give into reality just yet, even if she’s definitely coming down.
Coming down. With the dwindling effects of the mushrooms, so goes the potential of the ritual. There still is Dia de los Muertos, but without the accompanying rite of the drug and the shared belief of the Halloween celebrants working in conjunction, she doesn’t have much hope that the rites will last.
Yolanda shivers and hugs her knees. “It’s not like people get that second chance to talk to the dead,” she says to no one.
“But you were always special.”
Yolanda whips her head around, not having expected the answer, particularly from the voice of her mother.
Her mother and father are standing in the sand behind her, holding hands. They’re half-faded, half-transparent. Their image flaps in the wind like it’s painted across a sheet of paper held by one upper corner.
“I’d given up. I thought I went through that all for nothing.”
Her mother’s arms flash from translucent to opaque, just long enough to wrap around Yolanda’s shoulders.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to move forward.”
The wind brushes past her ear. Her mother whispers, “We love you. You’ll choose the right way for you.”
“I don’t want to have to make the choice. I want to do both things, take both jobs. I want to do neither. I want to know what you think.”
Her father’s spirit doesn’t fully materialize, but she hears his words come across and echo on the wind and reverberate with the sound of the waves crashing into the shore. “My child, you came to us for what? For wisdom? What wisdom do you think the dead have that the living do not? We are in the past. You have surely discovered more? Better yet, you are still discovering more. If we have any wisdom, it is this: we have lived our lives and they are over. You still have the time that is left to you. Do not dwell on our lives. Find a way to make your life what you want it to be.”
The sounds of his words fade, and her parents are gone again. The trip is over, as is the power of the spell.
Yolanda wanders along the shore until she finds the integral ∫ she drew, somehow not faded from the surf or the wind. She reaches down with both hands and erases it. Finding the stick right where she dropped it, she replaces that integral with the delta. The past is past. What’s ahead of her is change.
Yolanda inhales a large breath of air coming off the Pacific, turns and leaves the beach in search of breakfast and coffee to fuel the start of the change she will make for her life.