Galaxy's Edge Issue 43: Tribute Issue by Mike Resnick

Author:Mike Resnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612424927
Publisher: Phoenix Pick
Published: 2020-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

George Nikolopoulos is a master of the short-short, these days known as flash fiction. His Galaxy’s Edge story, “You Can Always Change the Past”, has been selected to appear in Baen’s The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF.

I AM SALVADOR

by George Nikolopoulos

I woke up from the strangest dream to see a small boy standing next to my bed, looking at me. He seemed no more than two years old.

When he saw that I was awake he said nothing; he just motioned me to follow and walked out of the room.

I got out of bed and followed him. No more melting clocks, and yet it felt like I was still dreaming.

The boy wore a white nightshirt that resembled a miniature version of mine. His footsteps made no sound on the wooden floor.

We went out to the porch and walked to the barn. It had rained in the evening, one of the first autumn rains; the earth was damp and moist under my bare feet. A crescent moon had risen in the east, casting enough light to let me see where I was going.

We reached the barn and still he hadn’t turned once to look at me or made any sound, and yet I followed like a dog on a leash.

After all the silence, the sound of the creaking door when I entered the barn almost made me jump; he’d squeezed in through the opening but I was larger and had to push the door open on its rusty hinges.

The barn smelled of hay and fresh manure. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, I could see the boy clearly. He’d stopped walking and stood right there looking at me. He seemed oddly familiar.

“Who are you?” I said. My voice sounded thin to my own ears.

“Yo soy Salvador Dalí i Domenech,” he replied.

I wanted to laugh, and yet I didn’t feel like laughing. The whole scene was so eerie that nothing seemed beyond the bounds of possibility.

“I am Salvador Dalí i Domenech,” I said.

He smiled, and I realized why his face was so familiar.

“You were named after me,” he said. “You were born nine months after my death.”

He didn’t sound like a boy of two; but he was a ghost, if his claim was true. I was eighteen, and he was older than me. My older brother, who died at the age of two, nine months before I was born.

I remembered my mother taking me to his grave when I was five. She’d told me I was his reincarnation. At the time, I’d believed it; yet now he stood in front of me, so it seems that after all I wasn’t.

“Why are you here?” I asked. “Aren’t the dead supposed to be...somewhere?” Heaven, hell, purgatory; anywhere but here. I was jittery. I should have never left my bed. Was I still dreaming?

“I was born to be the greatest painter of all time,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to die that young. My death was a mistake of the Fates. It was wrong.

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