A brief retelling of the moving pictures in my memory of “Moving Pictures” , a short story by Andrew Jones:
Is seeing your fate in advance a blessing or a curse? What would you do with the power to see your future if you had it?
A young man was given a secret embedded in a simple toy. Through the slots in a cylinder he could see the last day of his life as it wound down. The preliminaries and the final event of his passing. The man told no one and buried the toy in a watertight box in the bottom of a forest pond. Once a year he would visit the pond and retrieve the toy to watch his last day. He would then sink it again and return to his simple life.
In his old age, the man’s four grown children began noticing strange sequences in his behavior on their trips home. Many crates were delivered to his porch. A locked door shut off a wing of the house. Inscrutable noises emanated from behind the door. Correspondences.
At his deathbed he gave them all knowing winks and smiles and quickly drank a tincture when all but one person were out of the room.
In his wake, he left instructions to take his ashes and a sealed box to a large house on a hill several days’ journey away. All his children went, one reluctant.
Before the arrival to this shrouded mansion on a hill, a storm began to rise. The few had barely arrived at the gate when the wind swirled gustily and the rain pattered hard on the cobblestones leading up to the house. They hurried to the door and were welcomed into the grand old home and ushered into the study of a young man who looked old. Or was he an old man who looked young? There was something about his eyes.
The Old Man laughed and twinkled and regaled the young travelers with stories of their father. He easily opened the locked box and produced a stack of bendable slides. He swore siblings to secrecy before unceremoniously tossing the bundle of pictures overhead. They watched them fly into the air above them and noticed for the first time, to their surprise, a crystalline dome in the tower above them which captured the picture slides in something like an updraft and held them there, hovering and swirling. The light from the thunderstorm now blowing full bore around the safety of the warm study flashed through the crystal dome and fractured, conjoined, multiplied, and bent the light, showing sequences of pictures. Some images fully familiar, some partially obscure, some altogether untranslatable flashed and danced around the walls of the room. All were enraptured and silent until the storm and the display dissipated.
The Old Man produced small packages in paper and whispered parting words to each of the four before demanding they retire before their long journeys home.
—
So you planned and saved and stored
Was your body slave or lord?
You were utilizing tools
Are we Kings or Gods? Or Fools?
