Back to the Beginning of Time
"What are you doing, Zack?" asked Alice as she walked into the bedroom she shared with her little brother.
"Building," he replied. Zack was not quite four years old, and his curly brown head was bent over a complicated structure made out of Lego bricks. He didn't like to waste words.
"Can I see?" asked Alice, leaning over his shoulder for a better look. She brushed a stray lock of blonde hair out of her eyes. Sometimes Daddy said she was almost six, but actually she was more than five and two thirds and not quite five and three quarters. Details like that were very important to Alice. She peered closely at Zack's creation.
"I think it looks like a unicorn," she said decisively.
Zack was offended, "It's NOT!"
"Yes, it is," she argued, with a big-sisterly patience that was almost insulting, "See? There are the legs and there's the head and there's the horn on the head . . . "
"It's not! It's a spaceship!"
"THAT doesn't look like a spaceship at all."
Zack shrieked and gave her a shove. He wanted her to go away, because all of a sudden his spaceship, which had been perfect, didn't look at all like a spaceship anymore and it wasn't perfect. Zack wished his sister could be in the furthest place away from him that there ever was.
Something happened then, and what it was neither child was ever able to explain. Alice tripped. She felt herself falling, so she grabbed Zack's arm to catch herself. And then they were both falling, and somehow they missed the floor of their bedroom all together.
They landed in a tangled heap on a pile of black rocks and for a moment Zack thought he might cry, because he had banged his elbow. But then he saw where they were.
"Liss, Liss! Look!" He tried to untangle himself from her. For a few minutes both children scrambled in a confusion of arms and legs. When they had sorted themselves out they found that they were sitting in the midst of the strangest landscape they had ever seen.
"Where are we?" asked Alice, awed.
"I don't know," said Zack. He jumped up onto his feet. "Liss, look at the fire!"
She looked, then squinted away from the light that hurt her eyes. What Zack had called fire was actually (she did like that word) actually a glowing white mass moving steadily across an inky black sky. They were sitting in the middle of a barren blasted landscape of jagged black rock. In the distance Alice could see volcanoes glowing red and spewing clouds of black smoke. The ground under the children shook.
"Zack! I think that's the sun!"
"The sun don't move!"
"It did. A long time ago. I read about it in a book." Alice had asked Mommy to teach her how to read three years ago, when she was two. So, of course, she knew a lot more about the world than Zack did, because he was only beginning to read now, and he hadn't read nearly as many books as she had. "When the world was first being made, the sun was a lot younger. So, it was a lot brighter. And in the beginning the earth used to spin around a lot faster, too. So the days were shorter and you could see the sun moving. And there were volcanoes and earthquakes and nothing else because there weren't any plants or animals or people on the earth yet . . . " her voice faltered. Tears welled up in her blue eyes (which everyone said were just like her father's eyes). "I want to go home!"
Zack was frightened. He wanted to go home, too. The sun, if that's what it really was (Zack still wasn't sure), was starting to slide down toward the horizon. It was going to get dark soon. He wanted Alice to tell him what to do, the way she usually did. But Alice's chin was crumpled and the corners of her mouth were down and Zack knew that in another moment she was going to start crying.
He looked around at the black burning world again, and wished fervently that he knew the way home.
Suddenly, he saw something.
Zack grabbed his sister's arm, "Liss, look! See the road?"
She looked, but she didn't see anything. "No. There's no road." A tear trickled down her cheek and another threatened to follow.
"SEE!" he insisted, pointing. "It's right there! Maybe . . . "
"There's no road, and it's going to be dark and we're millions of years in the past and there shouldn't even be any air to breath and I WANT MY MOMMY!"
Zack grabbed his sister with both hands and tried to pull her up off the ground. "Liss, you stop talking. You're messing up my words!" He tried to explain, "I know to get home. All we do is walk!"
She stood up, "Do you really know how to get home?" Alice wanted to believe him, and after what had just happened, it didn't really seem all that impossible that they could walk home from the beginning of the world.
"YES!" said Zack decisively.
So, holding hands, both children began to walk a road that only the youngest of them could see.