The Fourth Factor

I’m in a car with my mother, driving down an unfamiliar road towards the house where she's living—it seems that I’ve come here to visit her and will be leaving soon. We aren’t far from the house, but she indicates that I should turn off to the right, where there’s a cemetery. I already have some idea what this is about since I know there’s a grave here that she’s been taking care of. We’ve already visited a couple times during the course of this visit. I turn into the entrance.

Now we’re both walking through the cemetery. It’s a bit overgrown, but a livelier place than you might expect since there are kids running around doing kid things and other people who are here visiting.

Some of the children are decorating the grave we’re headed for. They’re debating over where to put a special artifact—it looks like a small spiral seashell, only brown and lightweight like a cicada skin. Right now, they have it set on the leaf of a flowering plant, but it seems to be bending the leaf back too far.* (At some point, I couldn’t say exactly when, I seem to have become a different person—a friend of my mother’s, a man, maybe in his 40s or older.)

Eventually, somebody gets the idea of calling up the spirits themselves and asking them how they want the grave to look. Now there are a number of them floating around, including one that is just a disembodied hand. They ask it to point to what it wants on the grave—but, unexpectedly, it goes straight for my car keys. Really? But I know I have to give them up now.

But I also know—not from the man’s perspective, but from somewhere outside it—that they are laying claim to the keys because they like him, they think he’s a great guy, and by doing this, they can prevent something bad from happening to him that they know is in his future otherwise. The fact that he is massively inconvenienced in the process is completely incidental.

*Note: I had spent a few hours of the previous day on website design, a lot of which is figuring out how to get thing A to location B without messing anything else up. An interesting parallel here.

2.4.18