everything

That ever was still is, somewhere

                —Tracy K Smith

 

My new book of short stories is available in paperback at Gallery Books in Mendocino. My first book, Behind The Locked Door is also available. (LINK)

Both books are available as ebooks from Amazon (LINK).

The idea behind the title of my book is based on the following reflections derived from Einstein’s theories.

When you look up at the night sky, you are not seeing the stars as they are now — you are seeing them as they were when their light first began its journey toward Earth. The stars are so far away that even light takes years, centuries, or even millennia to reach us. Some galaxies visible with telescopes are millions or even billions of light-years away, showing us the universe as it was when life on Earth hadn’t even begun.

Some of the stars we see may no longer exist in their current form: They may have exploded as supernovae long ago. They may have dimmed or evolved into red giants or white dwarfs. But because their light is still on its long journey across space, we continue to see their “ghost images” from the past.

One of Einstein’s most quoted reflections came in a 1955 letter of condolence to the family of his lifelong friend Michele Besso, written shortly before Einstein’s own death: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

In the theory of relativity, time is not universal or absolute. Space and time are woven into a single fabric — spacetime — in which all events (past, present, and future) coexist in a four-dimensional continuum. To Einstein, the universe was like a “block” — everything that has ever happened or will happen is laid out in this fabric. From that perspective, nothing truly “passes away”; it simply occupies its coordinates in spacetime forever.

So in Einstein’s view, your life — and everyone’s — is not lost but fixed in the structure of the cosmos. We move through it as we perceive time flowing, but all points remain eternally present in the universe’s geometry.

He saw the universe as a lawful, eternal order in which the individual self dissolves back into the whole: “A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”

“I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of men.” For Einstein, then, eternity did not mean personal immortality, but the continuity of the cosmos itself — the persistence of energy, form, and law. Our consciousness arises from that eternal structure and returns to it, much as a wave rises and falls back into the sea. 

The individual ego does not persist; the pattern does. Time is not something that passes, but something that is. In that sense, every event, every moment of your life, exists forever within spacetime.

Einstein’s “block universe” concept — implied by relativity — holds that past, present, and future coexist in spacetime.

Nothing truly vanishes; everything that has happened and will happen simply is, fixed within that four-dimensional continuum. The sky above us is a theater of ghosts, a shimmering record of what once was, not of what is.

 

Pieces Of Time Contents

 

The Fifties

Ménage à Trois

Big Fish

Women Alone

Roger’s Secret

Bailey

Uncle Ned

 

The Sixties

The Fletchers

Twenty-Dollar Bill

The Barula Ching

The Last Time

In the Clover

 

The Seventies

Ribeauville

Emma of White Rushes

Lois

Reclaiming Willard’s Trophies

After the Accident

 

The Eighties

The Dead Man

The Backpack

Seduction

She Raven

Don’t Explain It Away

Margaret

Henry’s Woodpeckers

 

The Nineties

Money Chase

How Was Yelapa?

Maya

Nahual

 

The 2000s

Madge

García García

Zihuatanejo

Two Oysters

Desipio

The Argument

The Dust Gatherers

A Cautionary Tale From a Personal Experience

 

The 2010s

Jamaica

The Inheritance

Dandelion

Tag Along

The Optimist

Charlotte Marie

The Grass Is Greener

Where Is Santiago?

Green Leaves, Muted Flowers, Darkness

 

The 2020s

Friend Me

Intestinal Fortitude

Wind Lightning Thunder Rain

 

Mendocino

Huckleberry Blood

Mendocino Wind

Redwood Brain

Salt Fog

Statue

The House

Dreaming of Gogol

 

Where The Ordinary Meets The Impossible

In settings that range from small-town America to Mexico and Jamaica, ordinary people, caught between the real and the surreal, grapple with the most unlikely twists of fate as they struggle to understand life. A young Hispanic boy learns the meaning of love from a fish stranded in a Sierra rock pool. A girl confronts the darkness behind her creative talent. A vagabond handyman is chased out of one town and then reappears in a later story to find his purpose. A character slips from a 13th-century tale into a 20th-century brothel. A depressed man escapes suicide–or does he?–after anonymously helping a Scottish girl whose mother is dying. A cocaine dealer quits the habit after an encounter with a talking raven. A MAGA loyalist discovers he’s gay. An apple grower hides the grotesque truth of his secret hobby. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses on a mission are arrested at the Mexico City airport. This is flash fiction at its sharpest–strange, fast, and unforgettable. These stories will keep you awake while you wait for our surgical readjustment or your DMV appointment.