“O Call Back Yesterday”

Flash Fiction

Vanitas, Still Life with Books and Manuscripts and a Skull, Evert Collier, 1663.

Authors note: This piece is a response to Sarah Faxon and Labyrinthia Mythweaver ’s latest prompt offerings, along with being inspired by James (HVR) and The In Between ’s latest collaboration.

“That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.”

The ancient words all but whispered from the moribund pages of the long discarded tome, their meaning lost to all but the most discerning - and yearning - of souls. What was derided as mere poetry by the worldly wise was, in fact, the true “golden key, that opens the palace of eternity”, the philosopher’s stone long sought - in vain! - by the material alchemists: man himself, into whose mind the Supreme “has put eternity… yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” But I - I, of all who walk the Earth - found it, after many a year of sore travail, wandering as a mental pilgrim through the labyrinth of metaphysical speculation!

Time, long held as the eternal enemy of the race, garbed by artists down the ages in the cruel habiliments of the grave, is in fact at Man’s command. Through the medium of thought - that most potent but neglected of cosmic forces - can we not traverse the span of ages; nay, ascend into the highest reaches of the heavens? Did not the Nazarene seek to remind us of the elden truth: “Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High”? But we, in capitulating to the seemingly ringed fixity of “facts”, “die like men”. We, made in the very image and likeness of Creative Power - whose avatar proclaimed “the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do” - who squander our estate on vain trifles.

Well did I know and utter that most contemptible litany of the world weary soul, reflecting back on what may well have been:“you can’t change the past.” But, if “eternity” has been placed in the mind of every child born of woman, to whom “all things are possible”, why not a revision of one’s past, which is one of the “many mansions” in the house of Divine Mind?

My long years of questing (born of the desperation of wasted living) had brought me to the very brink of realization, seated there before the forgotten volume in the depressing confines of my bachelor’s garret, in the perverted bowels of the metropolis. Lonely, dedicated practice had finally seen the streams of time stilled.

“All things be ready if the mind be so,” I whispered, as the dreary walls of my apartment dissolved into the livening light, which had shone so brightly that spring morning some twenty years past…

We were walking back to her dorm on the opposite side of campus after our morning literature class, the radiant spring sun beaming from on high. In the seeming blink of an eye a flood of rain, straight from the pages of Genesis, let loose from the heavens. Where awkward hesitation had ruled the previous outcome, this time I took her hand and we ran, soaked to the bone and laughing with the joyful abandon that only the young can truly know, to the warm embrace of her room where we made spontaneous love…

From that newly remade scene, the years jumped ahead. Fresh from the wedding chapel, we wound our way down the familiar narrow two-lane roads of our native New England, bounded by moss covered stone walls. Regal oaks and maples arched overhead, their wet leaves hypnotically glistening in the early afternoon sun. A little further on the swaths of densely wooded lots gave way to sweeping pastures, rich with the green of Spring. Clusters of sheep and cows dotted the fields at intervals, contentedly grazing on the Earth’s bounty, in the company of my beloved: all perfectly reflecting my present state of supreme bliss, as the words of the Bard flashed through my mind -

“O call back yesterday, bid time return.”

© Conor MacCormack, 2026. All rights reserved.