The Far Side of the Sun

He saw smoke coming from the chimney of his now sprawling house, and wondered if Rebecca was already there, and he looked with pride at the growing solar array on the hillside beyond the clinic. Soon the sun would slide beyond the western hills, and lights would wink on inside many of the houses in the village, and he remembered Heidi easing him into the fight with the academics, easing him into the Will to fight to join the rest of humanity, even if only on the village's terms. For the time being, anyway.

He looked back on those days with a quiet kind of nostalgia, on the days before the girls came.

He thought back, back to Chelsea fighting to save Heidi, getting an IV set up on her own, always calm Chelsea. How afraid they'd been, and how brave Chelsea had become. Then there was that idiotically brave Air Force helicopter pilot that had fought his way up the valley through that hideous snowstorm, and how the physicians onboard had risked everything for Heidi.

There was a time when he might have looked upon such things as miracles, but no more.

Miracles were made by people pulling together, the hard work of countless people working together to make great things happen. Was that God's plan? Maybe. Maybe it was, or perhaps not, but he knew now there was no way he would ever know. He did finally understand now that mystical thinking hadn't saved Heidi. Pilots and physicians who had trained for years tried to save her, and so he did understand on a very personal level that once you fully embraced science, it became a part of the "modern" way of life – whether you understood it or not. Heidi had shown him that, yet he also knew that a life without miracles was impossible. The warm flesh in each of his hands was living proof of that. No way to reconcile the two, but to deny science's role in their life now was folly. Just accept the two ideas will always be hard to reconcile, and move on.

He walked by the clinic, saw a light on in an exam room and wondered who was working this late.

"Girls? Run on home now, I'll be along in a moment."

He walked inside, made his way over to the exam room and looked in.

Heidi was standing by the table, suturing an open gash on a little boy's thigh under impossibly bright light. Her robotic braces held her up, kept her steady on her feet while she walked around the table, and he watched her for a moment, the pride in her strength of purpose radiating from his eyes. She kept talking about new stem cell treatments, and that maybe someday soon she could throw away the braces and...

"Who's that? Your husband?" the little boy on the table said.

Heidi turned, looked at Martin for a moment then turned back to her work. "Yup, that's him," she said carefully as she finished closing the wound. Looking down at her sutures she assessed the quality of her work, and satisfied, she dressed the wound, gave the boy a bottle of pills and a few words of advice about playing with knives, then helped him down from the table.

"It's stiff," the boy said.

"It will be for a few day, but remember, keep it dry and no running for at least a week. If you see any blood around the stitches, come see me. Anytime, day or night."

"Yes, mum."

"Now, I bet your mom is worried. Go on! Get on home before it gets dark!"

The kid hurried from the room and out the clinic, leaving Heidi to clean up the mess.

"Here, let me help you," Martin said.

"No need. I'll only be a minute," she said as she turned to him. She smiled and scrunched her nose at him.

"Oh, lordy girl, you know better than to do that to me, don't you now?"

"You'd think by now I would," she said as she turned to him, "but some girls never learn..."

Adrian Leverkühn (C) 2015