It was the first of May when George died.
He was five years old and the apple of his parents' eye.
The tragedy tore the couple apart like a rip in the fabric of everything, into which, they both fell forever.
Like a dark angry stranger, grief carried off their marriage until it had vanished leaving nothing behind.
The boys father, Colin, threw himself completely into his work as a physicist. The mother threw herself into the arms of the neighbour.
The loss of their child, that most terrible of all terrors, stalked them until they felt nothing. Not for each other. Not for the world.
Like a cruel beast it had severed them from humanity and set them adrift in a sea of their own tears.
Colin's work at the lab was pure astrophysics.
It involved building a miniature universe in order to study time.
Super-cooled rubidium was strafed with lasers to create a small-scale cosmos of twirling atoms and draping nebulae.
It seemed like alchemy.
Like gold rising from nothing touched by the Almighty's handprint.
The team knew it was pioneering work Colin was doing. They felt sure he was destined for prizes. Field. Nobel. Something illustrious.
Colin didn't care about any of that. He was solely concerned with time, it's buried arrow, a notion as buried as his dead son. His destiny lay with him.
He loved George.
He hated time.
It had taken his child.
He wished to unearth it and lay his palm upon it alongside the Creator.
He envisioned surfing high waves of thick dark matter to the deadest of ends, the end where his boy was alive and well.
Colin's only future lay in the past, dormant like a dreaming dog.
The arrow of time, the before and after.
Was it really just a human abstract of wishful thinking, a fathomable yardstick of life or was it truly a celestial geometry traversing the great expanse, a sacred queue of tomorrows, a deep mirror of yesterdays.
Somewhere in that bubbling nursery of bosons he'd fashioned, Colin felt certain that his lost boy was simply trapped in the clag of entropy at the edge of understanding.
He could feel it.
The grieving father abandoned normal routines and lived at the lab. He ate and slept there. He was now oblivious to those around him, who saw a shambling scientist letting go, a space tramp in the corner of the room.
Colin had only one purpose.
To comprehend the hands of eternity and re-unite with his son.
It was increasingly warm outside. June's heat had come early, the season's distemper fattening the shadows of early summer.
Beyond his window, Colin could see a pack of mongrels, feral and free. They were enervated by the sunshine and splayed out in the shade of a derelict church abandoned by the locals on the edge of town. He felt for those mutts. He felt an affinity. In the dog days of their existence on the callous fletch of time.
The rest of the team distanced themselves from the increasingly bedraggled man, their work now completely separate and had erected a partition diving the lab.
The days merged into night's realm as June geared up like a time bomb and the beleaguered scientist began to lose hope, as the red shift's silent tick eluded him still.
It was June 21st, Midsummer's Solstice, that longest of days when daylight reigns and illuminates the hemisphere.
Colin was peering into his fabricated world, gripping the arc lamps, when the crystal pendant round his neck dangled and fell into the maelstrom.
It was the crystal he and George had grown together in his final year before cancer had taken him.
To Colin that crystal was the Sun itself.
As the object went into the particle chamber it emitted a blinding searing flash. The artificial universe exploded and them imploded and swallowed the hapless scientist.
He opened his eyes to find himself spinning helplessly in the ether. He was whirling wildly but with a titanic effort he righted his fall and took stock.
Colin was now microscopic, a free radical in a cloud of neutrinos gawping straight into the depths of creation.
He noticed a darker spot too.
It was a blemish in the firmament of stars and it dawned on him what had also grown in his lab.
A black hole!
Feral. Wild. Asleep.
It was A black hole of infinitely small proportions, but one nonetheless, an obvious anomaly in the steady space brimming with birthing planets.
To Colin it looked like a dark porthole.
Inevitably a foreign object like himself, floating in a chemical heaven, began to drift inexorably towards it.
The black hole's compulsion slowly took hold of the man's mass and he spiralled in its iron grip.
Gradually Colin could see the boundary between space and the hole, the curved hadean border, the fabled singularity.
There was nothing he could do, as he was stretched like bubblegum by the sable drum and he felt his mind pulling apart as his body, life and soul fell over the event horizon into the realm of enigmas.
His form and thoughts were blended into the vortex of nothing and everything, where time and data were eaten, leaving just the bones of existence and somewhere at it's alien nadir, the naked skeleton of God.
Colin screamed, his fraught cry elongating until it wrapped itself around the walls of the infinite and re-entered his closing mouth.
His mind was cored like an apple, the sinews of his thinking shredded and remade over and over until the only thought left mushroomed in the hollow vastness of the blackened skies. The only thought that mattered. The only purpose.
George.
He was there.
Hello Dad.
Hello son.
How are you.
I'm fine Dad. I miss you and Mum.
Oh, we miss you too son. We miss you so much.
Dad.
What son.
I love you.
I love you too son. Mum too.
Dad.
Yes.
I'm sorry I left.
It's not your fault son. You were ill.
Dad.
Yes.
I have to go now.
Don't go son, please.
Dad.
Yes.
You have to go too.
Why.
You'll die.
I love you son.
Me too Dad. You need to go.
OK son.
Dad.
Yes.
Don't forget me.
Neverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
The power of this final word, charged with the candella of a billion stars and the searing shards of a riven soul, spun the weeping father backwards toward the mouth. His tears became a comet tail reaching far into the incalculable void where all things end.
He was free.
Colin's reshaped form popped from the singularity and he reconstituted, windmilling through the minute universe he had created between the rays.
Somehow he was out. Out and fully human standing in his lab staring down at his cosmos.
Goodbye George.
Goodbye Dad.
The miniature space Colin had forged imploded into itself, fizzled and was his heaven was gone.
He had grasped the animus and met his boy.
Colin walked out of that room into his longest day smiling, patted one of the sleeping dogs and never went back.
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