Free The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

now. You’re behind schedule. Have you been doing your leg extensions?”
    He had discovered that when he removed his brace, bending his knee until the ligaments tightened, then jerking his leg rigid, the joint would pop with a violent paroxysm of light. The lacerating sensation would last for several minutes. He could not stop testing it.
    “Not regularly, no.”
    She jotted something down in his folder. Then, contemplatively, she asked, “Did anyone ever tell you you were dead when the paramedics brought you in?”
    “No. Wait. I was?”
    “You were. The doctors revived you on the operating table. It’s a miracle you’re alive today. You should have some respect for that miracle and take better care of yourself.” She clicked her pen shut with a flourish, as if punctuating the remark. “Okay. Lecture over. Like I said, I’m not ready to switch your crutchesout just yet, but I think we can get rid of that brace you’ve been wearing. You have to promise me you won’t test your limits, though. If your knee flares up, you’ll lie back and rest awhile. Can you promise me that? Can you? Mr. Williford? Hello?”
    So he had died, but what did that mean? Had his heart stopped beating? Had his brain shut down? Of the hours following the accident not one memory remained to him: no flash of images, no luminous white tunnel, only the sight of the bridge whirling smoothly, even elegantly, above him, like the long arm of a windmill, and then, some time later, the speckled yellow ceiling of the recovery room. His therapist wrote out a prescription for him. He left with an appointment to return in seven days. As his crutches conveyed him past the staircase and the admissions counter, past the bank of ferns twitching their fingertips in the air, it occurred to him that he had, quite literally, been resurrected. But resurrected into what? he wondered. His life had become unfamiliar to him, cold and disquieting. He felt as if time as he knew it had flickered to a close. The world had ended. The oceans had climbed their shores, the buildings had burst out of their windows, and all the old meanings had fallen away. It turned out that the world at the end of time was just like the world at the beginning: a single set of footsteps printing the grass, everything lit with its own newness, a brighter and much, much emptier place.
    He was passing a newspaper box when the front section of the
Gazette
caught his eye. Positioned above the fold, filling a quarter-page, was his photo of the girl in the bus shelter. The light from her cigarette burn was not as crisp in the paper’s mineral ink as it had been in his own emulsions, but the wound’s display of pain, that curved lily blooming so magnificently into the air, was no less remarkable for that. The girl’s arm plunged across the frame in a lovely white slash. The cigarette seemed to pierceher wrist like a nail. Behind it one could just make out the blurred fabric of her blue jeans and, in the upper left-hand corner of the shot, the braided green vines of a small tattoo. The photo was a stand-alone, with no companion article. The caption read, “Melissa Wallumrod, 17, practices bodily mutilation with her friends Monday morning near Allsopp Park.
Gazette
Staff Photo/Jason Williford.”
    He took out his phone and dialed his editor, who answered, “Jason! How does it feel to be back in the land of the living?”
    “It feels fine. But—”
    “Well, you earned it, my friend. That’s one first-class shot you took. What we need now is to get you out on assignment somewhere. The Middle East. South Central. Name your war zone. Someplace where you can really exercise your skills.”
    “Paul, listen, I have a question for you. How did you trace the girl’s name?”
    “Girl?”
    “The one in the picture. The one with the cigarette.”
    “Oh, that was easy,” he said. “What happened was I sent one of the interns over to the park and, well, okay, no luck there, but then I sent him to