Day 2 Winner of Quarto’s 2020 Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest. View the prompt here.

I return to the day of the threshing. It’s no banner day, not like days the others choose. When the Event unmoored us (a disruption, the scientists said, to our objective notions of temporality), people tended to travel to the notable days of their lives. Weddings, funerals, births. At the beginning, it was popular to return to the day of one’s birth. To witness the crowning. I saw it, and my children's births, and my grandchildren’s births. But at the end of my life, my birth has lost its novelty.

We no longer measure in years, the word is meaningless, but I’m old, whatever that means. The scientists invented a new way of telling time, since our old methods became useless. They call it the Body Clock. Each heartbeat a tick, inching us towards inevitable collapse.

The day I choose is an ordinary day. October 8th, 1952, Salinas Valley. The heads of wheat curving down, loaded with seeds. A blood-red dawn and me barely fifteen and Pa, still a young man. Tawny, handsome, arteries not yet clotted. The cancer is a thing we won’t catch until years later, when it’s already too late.

On this day it is always October 8th and the perpetual dawn of a harvest morning. The men bring their scythes to the field. My first harvest, riding shotgun alongside Pa. We spend all day working. Pa smokes cheroots and cracks jokes. That evening, we watch our mare give birth to a foal.

Most old men choose to relive their finest moments. Their climaxes, conquests, glories. I have seen those days, but now, at the end of my life, I find myself choosing this one. For its ordinariness, promise, and brimming potential. The scythes swishing, swishing. Each wheat stalk dividing into a thousand infinitesimal moments.