He woke up to find he was eighty-five, but that was impossible, because he was only seven, and he had just turned fifteen, and he was thirty-one, but also fifty-two. His parents were young, and his parents were middle-aged, and his parents were aging. He was at their funeral. That was so long ago.

Sometimes these days he felt he spent too much time thinking, and so he’d go for a walk. He often went to the grocery store, where the checkout boy was his childhood friend Jake, who would sneak him free candy. But it was also the boy who had replaced Jake, that time Jake got sick. And it was an older man who had come out of retirement, needing the money. And it was a dour teenager who gave him a dirty look when he asked if they still had plastic bags. The teenager had purple hair. He remembered a time before purple hair, but then he himself had long hair, and short hair, and no hair. Mostly, no hair.

On his way home he passed a bar that was about to open, where he would meet his wife, where he was meeting her now, but the building was empty, was condemned, was demolished. He paused by the window of the bar—when it existed—and gazed inside. He saw her there, with her friends, before he knew her. His wife was a stranger, but now they met, and now they knew each other, and now they were married. She was young, she was healthy, and she had cancer. He was a child and had never known anyone who had died, but he was also eighty-five and had lost his grandparents, his parents, a sister, five dogs, and the bulk of his childhood friends. He had lost his wife.

When he was seven he had tried to imagine being old but had failed. At eighty-five he struggled to remember being a boy. They were both alive—each equidistant from the other; but also there was no young boy, there was no old man. They were all him. 

He got home from his walk. He lived on a farm, in a small town, in a large city. He ate pot roast with his parents, take-out with his friends, linguini with his wife. He ate alone. After dinner he took out a large plastic bin, looked through photos of his family, photos of himself. His family was large and small and here and gone. He put away the photos and brushed his teeth with a Batman toothbrush, an electric toothbrush—sometimes he forgot to brush.

Later, in bed, thoughts would come and go like clouds through the sky. Inevitably, the clouds would coalesce into a singular formation, a preferred arrangement, and he would be sitting at a table, in a bar, meeting a girl for the first time. They drank their beers. They laughed. All the while, an old man stared at them through the window.

He fell asleep. He slept on a farm, in a room he shared with his sister where light from passing cars cast ghostly imprints of swaying trees onto the walls. He slept in a basement apartment on an air mattress that lost half its air during the night. He slept beside a young woman, an older woman, a dying woman. He slept alone, with a dog, without a dog, in a large bed, in a small house, in a smaller house.

He had just woken up. He was prepared to sleep.

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J.D. Strunk was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in northern Ohio, and has a degree in English Literature from the University of Toledo. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, The Coachella Review, Palooka Magazine, MoonPark Review, Allium Journal, Jimson Weed, New Plains Review, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for The Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, and his story “Fresh Coffee” was nominated for Best American Short Stories. He lives in Denver, Colorado. IG: @jdstrunkwriter