Bob Bilkins had one gift. It manifested in his forty-fourth year in an otherwise entirely uninteresting life. If you'd told him what it was going to be, he'd laugh and dismiss you as a lunatic, your words as mean-spirited daggers. Bob's gift was very specific in one sense, and very expansive in another. It concerned a crane. In Bob's world the crane in question was an ordinary construction crane, the sort found at the sites of unfinished buildings. One day in this forty-fourth year, as he was walking past a site such as this, he happened to behold a crane sitting, immobile, in the centre of a great deep pit full of girders and bricks and cement. He looked down at it and, as far as he could tell, it seemed to look right back at him with its large metallic ball hanging like an eye from its nerve. He felt drawn inexplicably to the crane and continued to look at it.
Then, quite spontaneously, his gift revealed itself. Bob Bilkins found he beheld the crane not only in his own world, as a tool for the maintenance and growth of cities, but in many other worlds. You might call them dimensions, but it certainly doesn't matter. It was enough that Bob Bilkins was witnessing the "crane," but many times over, in many shapes and many forms. In one world the crane was a beautiful bird, skirting the surface of a sunset covered lake and plunging its beak into the water to scoop out a fish. Then, superimposed on this image, was the sight of a woman, tall and long-legged, tilting her neck at a certain angle to catch a glimpse of the sky through a canopy of trees. Then Bilkins saw a bright constellation of five stars; behind that a camera-mounted vehicle on a television set with a boom mic, being wheeled and pointed at various actors. Other images rolled in: a child hesitating on the brink of a cliff; a man pulling a load up into a truck, the muscles in his back flexing against the strain; a long, metallic arm rolling through the zero gravity of space, reaching out, unclenching metal fingers with great deliberation.
In a rush, a whole stream of additional images flooded in that seemed to have even less to do with cranes: a newborn, hidden in a bramble basket on a creek; a man climbing to his death; three inorganic organisms on another world, building a collection of interconnected dolls from shining bits of metal and glass and placing them one atop another, where they began to whirr and chirrup and emanate light; a dictator staring down at the ashen ruins of his city and repenting; a sword falling through air, carving the sky in twain, and the roiling God-fat of a thousand eviscerated daemons pouring through, melting the eyes that looked upon it; a faint light breaking through the clouds of a nuclear winter that has lasted ten thousand years; the final story falling from the lips of a woman in chains; a cross; a drop of sweat; a glimmer in the dark; eyes askance in a crowded room; the footsteps of an unwanted man down the hall; a wall groaning against the weight of a giant beast, with sixteen golden horns; a sharp, piercing cry in a maelstrom; the first pelting rain; a crack opening in the earth; the look in a boy's eyes as his feet slip; a building falling in upon itself; a starving fish digging up a small phosphorescent sphere in the deepest crevice of the ocean; a breath where there had been only silence; the moment before a great explosion; a flower before a scythe; a spear in mid-flight; a winged creature the size of an ocean, plummeting into a ball of burning gas; a sudden hole in the middle of a man's chest; the final words before the last mortal breath; and more. Far more than he could remember, or say, or could be contained in the confines of his mind.
Of course, Bob Bilkins never spoke after that moment, and devoted the remainder of his life to painting small, finely detailed portraits of hideous children and deformed animals on the insides of abandoned buildings. He was eventually found, curled up in a ball, with the carcasses of several never before identified species of insect lodged in his nostrils and an elaborate drawing of a crane carved into his chest. An autopsy discovered the body of a tiny humanoid creature inside his heart's left atrium, a discovery which led to the eventual institutionalization of three pathologists, a crypto-zoologist, and an unknown Canadian writer.
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