by

William Riling

Reedsy Prompt: Write a story named after, and inspired by, one of

Shakespeare’s plays. Think modern retellings, Meta-narratives, subversions, etc.

Newsflash – June 16th, 2024, Dateline: Verona, Wisconsin—

16-year-old Romeo Montague and 14-year-old Juliet Capulet were found dead today in the parking lot of Verona High School, the result of an apparent suicide pact. Texts of their final moments were found on the star-crossed lover’s iPhones but not released to the public. Funeral services are pending. In lieu of flowers the families are asking donations to be made to Suicide Prevention Hotline of Verona.

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(Transcript from Juliet Capulet’s iPhone. Property of Verona Homicide Dept.)

Romeo: FTT?

Juliet: No. PAW.

Romeo: IDC. Your parents don’t scare me.

Juliet: FYI My dad would see me unalive if he knew we were texting.

Romeo: PLS?

Juliet: W8. BBIAS.

Romeo: Don’t be long.

Juliet: Dad’s GFN. WAG1?

Romeo: Just want to say URA QTPI.

Juliet: U think URA rizzler? AI.

Romeo: BLATES. JSYK, UR Verona High’s hottest cheerleader.

Juliet: LOL! YGTR.

Romeo: I wanted to ask U to the prom BAE.

Juliet: SRSLY?

Romeo: For reals.

Juliet: ICYMI, URA Montague.

Romeo: IK. N URA Capulet.

Juliet: I guess a rose by any other name would still smell, but not like Axe Body Wash.

Romeo: ROFL! Now, that’s DISS.

Juliet: LOL.

Romeo: I dunno why our parents hate each other so much.

Juliet: URZ are MAGA.

Romeo: So, URZ are WOKE.

Juliet: Totally PEAK.

Romeo: ADIH. SUX.

Juliet: Hell? YGTR.

Romeo: So YAV?

Juliet: SRY, not available. Paris already asked me 2 prom.

Romeo: WTF? NO CAP? Paris? He’s like totally G.

Juliet: My parents insist. They see it as a LTR.

Romeo: IDGAF. UR going with me. ILY. I’m climbing up your balcony to get you.

Juliet: LMAO. UR Kray-Kray!

Romeo: SRSBSNS. I’m looking at you now, “WTF's that bright light in that window? OMG! It’s Juliet, like the sun, making the moon jealous 'cause she’s way more lit."

Juliet: ROFL! Now UR just SIMPING.

Romeo: HELLA. ILY.

Juliet: OMG! I don’t believe it.

Romeo: FR.

Juliet: Not U! Paris just sent me a SC.

Romeo: Snap Chat?

Juliet: FR! A dic-pic!

Romeo: SOB! DO U mean (Cucumber emoji)? (IYKYK.)

Juliet: IK! DAFUQ. That’s total DISS.

Romeo: I’m going to kick his A.

Juliet: Not B4 me! W8 until I tell Tybalt!

Romeo: GMAB. I don’t need UR cousin’s help.

Juliet: EZ. He wants to kick UR ass 2.

Romeo: Let him try. I got SWAG to take them both on.

Juliette: PROLLY. I'm you're number 1 STAN.

Romeo: It HITS DIFFERENT when it comes 2 U.

Juliet: IK. I'm you're GF. LET THEM COOK. U N Me R going to prom.

Romeo: KEWL! UR FIRE!

Juliet: N UR the GOAT.

Romeo: I’m going to score some Molly from Mercutio for the after party. YOLO!

Juliet: UR just hoping we be FWB. Remember, UR the LOML(Heart emoji)! MWAH!(Kiss emoji)

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(Transcript from Romeo Montague’s iPhone. Property of Verona Homicide Dept.)

Romeo: Mercutio, trying 2 get X or MOLLY ASAP. 4 prom.

Mercutio: I heard the stuff Tybalt has is SUS. Let me check with Benvolio.

Romeo: LMK. I’m FINNA look around.

Mercutio: Benvolio’s got X or GHB if U want 2 make a night of it.

Romeo: NLT. X.

Mercutio: JK. Go EZ on the stuff, OK?

Romeo: BLATES! Let’s M.I.R.L. at the SKL parking lot. THX, TTYL.

Mercutio: YW, OMW.

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(Transcript from Juliette Capulet’s iPhone. Property of Verona Homicide Dept.)

Juliette: RRWFATR?

Romeo: OMW. ETA 7pm.

Juliette: Wait until U see the dress Nurse made me. EPIC!

Romeo: CW 2 CU in it, CW 2 CU out of it 2!

Juliette: SMH. U expecting SEGGS? DYOR.

Romeo: U R my dream.

Juliette: N UR my BFF.

Romeo: OK, GF. CUINAMIN.

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(Transcript from Romeo Montague’s iPhone. Property of Verona Homicide Dept.)

Romeo: Mercutio, ANSWR UR phone! WTFRU?

Mercutio: WAZZUP?

Romeo: WTFU give me, man!? U said it was MOLLY! Juliette took 2! She ain’t breathing, man!

Mercutio: FU! I didn’t do nothing, GYAT! Benvolio sold me ’em!

Romeo: A curse on both your houses!

Mercutio: IDK! Maybe they’re laced with Fentanyl! Get her to the hospital man, STAT!

Romeo: I can’t hear her heartbeat. I can only hear mine and it’s breaking.

Mercutio: Dude, get ahold of URSELF. Call 911!

Romeo: It’s too late she’s dead! I can’t go on living without her.

Mercutio: DBS. Think!

Romeo: 2L8. I washed the rest of the pills down with a 20 OZ. Yeungling. Here's to my love! O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. Thus, with a kiss I die. CYA.

Mercutio: W8 a SEC. Delete these messages first! Romeo?

Mercutio: Romeo?

Mercutio: Romeo?

Mercutio: FML.

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(Transcript from Juliette Capulet’s iPhone. Property of Verona Homicide Dept.)

Juliette: OMG! Nurse!

Nurse: What’s wrong Juliette?

Juliette: I must’ve been asleep. I woke up in Romeo’s car to find he OD’d.

Nurse: Are you sure he’s dead? What do you see?

Juliette: What's here? A pill bottle, closed in my true love's hand. An empty can of Yeungling.

Nurse: Call 911.

Juliette: It’s too late for that. He's gone. FML. I found a garden hose in his trunk. O happy tailpipe! This is thy hose; there is exhaust and let me die.

Nurse: Juliette! Stop! You have everything to live for! Don’t do this!

Juliette: I already told Romeo my bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite. GTG.

Nurse: Juliette! No!

Juliette: Me…thinks… me feeling very drowsy indeed.

Nurse: I’m calling 911! Juliette!

Nurse: Juliette, answer me!

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(Transcript from Nurse's iPhone. Property of Verona Homicide Dept.)

Nurse: Tybalt, I have terrible news.

Tybalt: I heard. I just left the Capulets, and I am on my way over to inform the Montagues.

Nurse: They were so young.

Tybalt: IK. I shouldn't have been so hard on the kid.

Nurse: Don't blame yourself. It's not your fault.

Tybalt: OK. THX. TTYL.

Nurse: It's just a tragedy, for never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

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by Wilkinson Riling

Garret Lipman was thinking he must know how Adam felt in the Garden of Eden when Eve tempted him with the apple. After all, the fruit was plucked from the tree of knowledge and insider knowledge meant everything to a young day trader at Goldman Sachs. It wasn’t just the attempt at insider trading that had placed Garret in his current predicament. As with most things in his life, it was poor decision making that put him in a situation where he had no idea how to extract himself in this singular moment of time where he finds himself staring into a shock of blinding light. All Garret could think about were the events leading up to this very pulse pounding second.

Garret lived in a Mid-Town apartment that could just as well have been called a walk in closet with futon and hot plate. With a rent of $2,200 a month for the 13th floor walk up, and his $100,000 dollar a year income as a junior trader, Garret didn't feel he was exactly crushing it. To make matters worse, his alarm clock failed. He awoke already late for his job in the financial market thirty minutes away by subway train.

Garret owned one used Armani suit, charcoal gray, with two ties of similar gray tones, two Van Huesen white dress shirts and a pair of boot-black Velasca shoes with complimenting socks. His current wardrobe hung from the frame of his ten speed bike mounted to the wall, a relic from his days as a bike messenger. Garret could not remember the last time he trucked the bicycle down the long flight of stairs to take it out for a spin.

With no time to shower, several articles of said clothing were already on him as he bounded down the stairwell rushing to get to work. The suit jacket was the last to join the rest of his ensemble as he powered out the front door of his building and raced toward the subway. Today was supposed to be a very big day.

At work that day, Garret was going to manage the Sunshine Index Fund while his boss was conferencing out of town. It was called the Sunshine Index, as it was made up from the portfolio’s of residents from the state of Florida. The fund represented government workers, teachers, nuns and retirees, even law enforcement pensions. His job for the day was to do nothing, simply watch the fund. Again, do nothing, unless he saw any wild or even subtle fluctuations that needed to be brought to his boss’s attention, then he was to contact his boss immediately.

On any given day Garret was useless without his coffee. He would have to buy it now and drink it on the train. Luckily, the fact he was already thirty minutes into rush hour meant there was no line. He snagged his Venti ignoring that they wrote “Gary” on the cup. If there was a Gary back there, he was shit out of luck as far as Garret was concerned. He was already through the turn-style high stepping for the waiting subway car.

The activity by the subway car was like a frenetic beehive as commuters were disembarking or piling in with a simultaneous herd mentality. By the time Garret arrived, the doors started to close. He yelled for someone to hold them open, but the office workers just stared at him, a zombie look upon their faces. They were off to the type of jobs spent in cubicles of monotony that give one the feeling of being among the living dead. The train pulled away as Garret skidded to a stop. The lid to his coffee flew off spilling hot coffee on his wrist. Garret moved the dripping coffee from hand to hand like a hot potato. In his balancing act, some coffee spilled onto his dress shirt leaving a stain.

“Dammit!” Garret was about to unleash a tirade of swear words one might hear from a sea captain with Tourettes.

“Late for work?” The voice was sultry with the hint of a teasing tone.

Garret spun on his heels, spilling more coffee. On the platform, against the wall, stood a small old-fashioned wooden kiosk painted blood red, almost like a phone booth from hell but slightly larger. On the display, several electronic gizmos were offered for sale. Everything from burner phones to smart ones, including tablets and watches. Garret was sure this booth wasn’t here yesterday. He was surprised he was able to take in all of his minute observations at a glance especially since the booth was manned by a woman. Not just any woman.

This young woman was absolutely stunning. Relaxed, she posed on her chair by the kiosk like Mrs. Robinson in the Graduate. Garret guessed, standing, she’d be about 5’9 with sensual curves lacking any sharp tangents. Her breasts were easy to describe; perfect. Her body seemed to be in motion even though she was sitting still. Her hair, wine red, hung past her shoulders. Garret stared into her eyes unsure if he was detecting a yellow ring within the reptilian green of the irides that orbited her pupils. When she smiled, her ivory white teeth shone, two canines peaked out from inside her cherry red smile.

“Perhaps I can help you with that, Garret.” It wasn’t a whisper, but felt like one.

Garret almost dropped his coffee. “How do you know my name?

She placed an elbow on a knee and her head into her hand while the other waved him off. “Oh, I know a lot about you, Garret Lipman. For instance; I know you work at Goldman Sachs.”

“Who are you and how do you know me?” he said with a mix of intrigue and growing unease.

She smiled, tilting her back for a laugh. “Your access card, silly. It’s hanging around your neck.”

Garret looked down, snapping up his access card that hung from a lanyard. With it, he gained access to the elevator that took him to the seventieth floor and Goldman Sachs trading center. Feeling silly, Garret shook his head. “Just the same, you’ve got pretty damn good eyesight.”

“I do, and I can see that you are late. I have just the thing for you.” The woman turned to some items hanging from peg holes and removed a smart watch. She spun back to Garret with a smile the Chesire Cat would envy. She continued, “A special watch, for a special man.”

It was a golden AppleWatch with a honeycomb band and bejeweled frame. Garret thought it must easily be a thousand dollar watch. It looked even more stylish than his boss’s $10,000 Rolex, definitely an eye catcher.

Garret stuttered. “I can’t… I’m sorry, you know my name, what’s yours?”

“Eve.” Eve gently took a hold of Garret’s wrist and lay the watch across. “It’s perfect.”

“I’m sorry, Eve. I can’t afford that.”

“Of course you can, we have a very generous payment plan.” She started to attach the watch.

Garret pulled his wrist away. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t. I have to get going. Like you said, I’m late.”

She cooed. “You’ve got ten minutes before the next subway train arrives. Let me show the watch’s amazing features.”

“I can’t…”

“Relax, Garret.” Her voice gentle as a mother’s kiss. Garret felt all the anxiety escape his body via his shoulders. Eve set his coffee down and took hold of his wrist once again.

Garret never felt her slip the smart watch on, he only realized it was in place when he looked from her eyes back to his wrist. His mouth formed to whistle as he took in the beauty of the device. The gold band sparkled and the jeweled framed screen was a rich obsidian color. With her thumb, Eve pressed a button turning the watch on. Garret was already well ahead of the watch in that department. A half dozen electronic icons took their place on the watch screen like soldiers awaiting orders.

“This watch can measure your heart rate.” Eve pressed the heart icon. A diagnostic graph appeared showing his pulse rate and O2 level. “Right now it’s pretty high, wouldn’t you say?"

Garret’s cheeks flushed red. He was lost in her eyes. He gathered himself. “I did just run for the train, y’know.” He continued to search for an explanation. “…and I am late for work.”

“Ah yes. About that. Check this out.” Eve’s thumb dialed the digital crown of the watch. One app closed, a second app, showing a quarter moon graphic, opened. “This app measures your sleeping patterns, You can get an idea if you’re getting the right amount of sleep. Plus, check this out…” She tapped the screen. “You can set an alarm and the phone actually taps you awake.”

Garret felt a tapping vibration on his wrist from the watch. “I’ll admit that’s cool, but this is way out of my budget.”

“You work in finance right? This app gives you up to the minute stock readouts. It connects to the same high speed frequency trading systems companies like your Goldman Sachs are connected to. It’s state of the art.”

This tidbit got Garret’s interest. He took a closer look with Eve encouraging him. ”Go ahead, ask it about a stock. Just speak into the watch.”

Garret raised the watch to his mouth. “Okay… Apple Inc.?” Instantly, a stock readout appeared giving a real time animated trading price. Garret noticed a graph in the corner of the screen. “What’s that?”

Eve grinned. “I told you it uses the same HFT that the big financial hedge funds use. It taps into their AI infused algorithm and predicts a future price in nanoseconds.”

Garret was impressed. “I can do that from my desk because we’re tapped into huge proximity server farms. Seeing that ability on this watch is incredible.” Garret noticed another icon. It was the image of a clock face circled in red with a slash cutting through the center. “What’s this?”

“Don’t touch that...” Eve warned. Garret looked at her confused. Her smile morphed into the kind of look a person gives when sharing a secret they only know. “…Until I show you just how special this watch is.”

She stood and sidled up closer to Garret. He could feel the warmth of her body. “This button allows you to pause time. For seven seconds to be exact.”

A bell went off in his head. Garret’s skepticism leapt forward. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I see I’m going to have to demonstrate. May I?” Eve held her hand out for the watch.

Garret gave it over. She slid it on. “It really is sharp looking, isn’t it?” Eve took a step back and placed a finger to the watch. “Okay, ready?” Garret nodded. From his point of view, Eve disappeared. He looked left and right, where had she gone?

“Right behind you.” Her sultry voice said invitingly.

Garret turned to see she was smiling like a kitten who just caught a mouse. But he wasn’t buying it. “It’s a trick of some kind. You… you hypnotized me.”

“What about your coffee?” She pointed to his coffee cup on the kiosk counter. He turned to look. One second it was there, the very next, it vanished. He spun back around to Eve. She was taking a sip. “Mmmm. Espresso macchiato. Nice.”

Eve stepped forward handed Garret his coffee and placed the watch back on his wrist. “Why don’t you give it a try?” She said, taking the drink back.

Garret held up the watch and readied to press the icon. He was nervous and confused.

“Go ahead.” Eve encouraged. “It can’t hurt you.”

“What do I do with seven seconds?”

“You’ll figure something out, I’m sure.”

With that, Garret pressed the app. He watched the smartwatch countdown in large red numerals go from seven to one.” He hadn’t moved. The countdown ended.

Eve sighed. “Try again, Garret. This time make use of that time.” She pointed to the watch. “Remember, time is money.”

Garret pressed again. He looked around the station. People were frozen mid walk. Papers floated in space. Everything was still and quiet. Then, looking at Eve, he could only think of one thing to do. Garret stepped up to Eve and stole a kiss. He stepped back as the clock ran out without a second to spare.

Eve noticing no change other than an eye blink seemed exasperated. “Garret, this isn’t going to work unless you do something with your time.”

Garret smiled and held up his coffee cup. Before the last few seconds of his time traveling expired, he had thought to take it back. He took a sip.

Eve was pleased. “Do you believe me now?”

Garret did believe her and his mind was already racing ahead. What he could do with an extra seven seconds on the trading floor could make him a billionaire and a Wall Street legend in a very short amount of time. These thoughts were interrupted as the next train arrived at the station.

“So would you like the watch?” she asked.

“Very much so.”

“Take it. It’s yours. Go. You’ll miss your train.”

Garret was lost in a cascade of dopamine enriched thoughts. In his brain he was already filthy rich with the sensual Eve as his girlfriend, or one of many, he couldn’t wait to get to work.

The doors to the car were closing. Garret pressed his smartwatch. Time froze. In five seconds he was aboard the train. Another two and the doors closed. He looked back. Eve was gone. The kiosk was gone. He checked to make sure the watch was still there and he hadn’t been hallucinating. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Eve.

She was frowning. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

He figured she must have followed him on board. “What?”

Her frown reversed. Eve held up a red pen and and a sales receipt. “You forgot to sign the sales contract.”

“What? How much is the watch?”

“Why don’t you worry about that after you make your first million?” She handed him the pen and paper and offered him her back to use for him to sign the contract. “Oh, and Garret? We offer no warranty.”

Garret signed the form. Eve used his back to stamp it with a notary stamp. The train arrived at the next station. Eve folded the contract and placed it safely between her ample breasts. “This is my stop. Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Lipman.” She stepped off the train. “And remember what I said, time is money.”

With that the doors closed and Garret Lipman was off to a future that, at times, would feel like it was coming seven seconds at a time.

Garret arrived at work a full hour and fifteen minutes late. The stock market had been going through a flurry of activity. since early morning. The dow was climbing, expecting to reach 40,000. Garret’s computer was already on thanks to Simone, his boss’s secretary. Garret thanked her for not reporting him late and in his mind added her to his list of conquests to be made once he struck it rich.

He dropped into his chair and and immediately began to analyze the funds attracting the most activity. He set the Sunshine Index Fund off onto a side monitor.

There was a frenzy of activity in the commodities fund. A new pipeline was being voted on. Garret checked the algorithm and it seemed to be hedging upwards. He watched it tick up, then down a point, then up again. He waited for the next uptick and hit the time pause button on his smart watch.

Everything on the seventieth floor came to a halt. Garret’s mouse circling his pad was the only thing moving. It took him five seconds to move the Sunshine Fund into the commodities index fund. Time started again. Garret watched as the next uptick doubled the value of the Sunshine portfolio. Based on the size of the transaction, he had just made a ten million dollar commission. He hit the time pause button again and quickly sent the fund back to it’s original setting in its conservatively managed index.

At the end of seven seconds, Garret leapt from his chair and shouted out in joy. Everyone on the floor turned, then froze. Garret had pressed his watch again, taking his seat hoping no one saw his display of euphoria.

Garret then noticed volatile activity in the real estate index fund. The arrow was snaking up high then dropping low then back to high. Similar to the commodities fund but bigger dips. The algorithm on his watch predicted a spike upwards. Garret was ready to blow things sky high. He hit pause and shifted the Sunshine Fund over. Seven seconds later the graph began to trend south. It dropped lower and lower. Garret watched in horror, on both his computer screen and watch face, the value of the Sunshine Fund plummeting in free fall. Someone was shorting the real estate market.

Garret needed to stop the bleeding. The seven seconds were up and the losses continued. Garret went into a panic. Then realized, he still controlled time. He would just shift the fund to other hedge indexes and play it the same way as his first attempt. Garret looked at his watch. His jaw dropped. The power died. The watch face went blank. Garret was out of his chair leaving it spinning. He needed to find Eve.

The rest of the afternoon Garret searched the entire subway system riding train after train in the oppressive heat of the summer New York City transit system. After three hours, Garret found Eve at her kiosk in the Hell’s Kitchen part of town. Garret ran up waving the watch. “Eve! The watch! It’s got no power. I think it’s broken! You have to fix it!"

Eve held up the contract. “I told you, no warranty.”

Garret snarled, “You bitch! Do you know what you did to me?”

She sneered. “But what I can do is sell you a new battery, but this will cost you more. Your first purchase cost you your character, this will cost you your soul.” She held up the battery.

Garret had no time to argue. “Give me the damn thing.” Garret signed the new contract.

Eve placed it with the other contract between her breasts. “I love it when I get a repeat customer.” She inserted the battery and powered the watch up handing it back to Garret. “Time is money.”

Garret checked the stock readout. The Sunshine Index Fund had lost 3/4 of it’s original morning value. It was only 3pm. There was still enough time to fix this by 4pm when the trading day closed. Garret had one more thing he needed to take care of. He pressed the seven second pause.

Garret kissed Eve for a final time then crossed to the platform to wait for his train. The train was coming. Garret turned back and called out to Eve. She looked up. He held up the two contracts. Eve looked down between her breasts to see they were gone. Garret smiled. He had lifted them during his seven second farewell kiss. He tore them up scattering them to the hot tunnel wind.

The train was almost at the station when Garret heard Eve’s sultry voice in his ear. “Sorry Garret, all sales final.” She was right behind him.

Garret wondered how did she get there so fast? Eve held up her own AppleWatch and smiled an evil smile. With a mighty shove, Eve pushed Garret onto the tracks, the train mere seconds away from hitting him. He hit the pause button one last time. Garret Lipman spent the last seven seconds of his life with his most recent moments flashing before his eyes, wishing he had more time.

by Wilkinson Riling

Every fisherman worldwide has a story of the one that got away, but in his seventy years, as one of his village’s most reliable providers of fresh fish, Pi Leung knew no one would ever believe the tale he could tell of today’s encounter. It’s a story that begins before dawn on a rainy day by a Pearl River tributary along its shanty stacked embankment where neighbor pressed against neighbor leaving little room to even turn to safely sneeze, or at least that’s how tight it felt to Pi.

Each home sat fronted by a fishing skiff docked in silent patience awaiting the rising tide. The scalloped gondola’s, with their wooden roofs and single oars locked in place, were alined stern to bow floating up and down rhythmically while the mild current passed as if a large snake swam beneath them heading downstream.

Rain usually meant a bad day for fishing, but Pi, a man of stubborn habit and faith was compelled to venture out. Habits learned from his father, plus a faith he had in himself because of those learned traits, had served him well. They helped him provide for a family which once included a wife, now made up of a son and a daughter-in-law and a grandchild.

The fishing yields of late had tapered off. To make money, the child’s father, his son, had taken a job at a textile mill fifteen kilometers inland. His son would be gone for days, returning on at month’s end usually bringing back a treat for the boy and linens for his wife and metal for Pi to fashion more hooks for fishing. Pi’s own wife had passed several years ago from pneumonia. A day didn’t go by where he didn’t long for her to be in bed beside him keeping him warm, sharing a comfort that comes from years of trust and love.

Today was different. There was an added pressure that threatened Pi’s very abilty to think straight. It took a focused concentration for him to fight away tears threatening to break the emotion controlled levy that held his normal stoicism. His grandson had taken ill and feverish in the night. The boy had attended his first day at school only the day before. Pi and the boy's mother worried another measles outbreak was on the horizon. His grandson’s eyes indeed were red, but there was yet to be any signs inside his cheeks of the Koplik spots that accompany the illness. This kept a spark of hope in the grandfather’s heart that it was nothing more than reaction to an infection yet to be determined. One in which there’d be a simple medicine for. Yet, in order to afford that medicine, Pi knew he needed to bring home some fresh fish to barter with.

In the cold drizzle of the dawn Pi held a lantern to lead him to his boat where he checked his equipment; hooks, line, netting, and bait. For bait he used the larvae of the Chinese Moon Moth. Pi learned from his father it was most effective as bait when it changed from it’s early orange/brown hue to it’s bright green and white pattern. The brighter colors seem to attract the bigger fish. Over many years, Pi Leung has had much success with this insect on the end of his line.

With gear ready and stowed, Pi took the single long handled oar from the forcola, slid it into the rear oar lock, and pushed off silently into the cold gray drizzled river.

The oar, acting like a giant fishtail, hung from the rear as Pi Leung stood tall at the stern paddling and leaving a gentle wake behind that would absorb the circles of raindrops with each stroke. Pi guided his fishing boat lit by the lone lantern along the tributary of the silt laden Pearl, past the leaning shanty’s with its fishermen still asleep in hammock and bed. Pi kept his strokes small and silent. He wanted to be sure no one was following him as he made for the secret fishing spot his father had shown him all those many years ago, and if the fates would cooperate, he’s be able to one day show his grandson.

Three miles down river there was a snaking canal off to the side that drifted beneath the umbrella of a banyan tree. The superstitious avoided this waterway that meandered through the thick foliage of bamboo, cattails and greenery, finally emptying out into a reservoir. In this man made lake, two boulders of varying size rested in the center. Together they resembled a large turtle, head and shell respectively. It was a place believed to be haunted.

The two mile wide reservoir had been built at the turn of the century to provide fresh water for the lower provinces in the valley below. In order to build it, an entire population of a small village was relocated, then the hamlet flooded over. There was rumor, the injured, elderly or infirmed who could not make the trip, were left behind to drown in the coming headwaters. The reservoir was said to contain evil spirits and was avoided by the fearful.

The rain was letting up when Pi Leung stowed the oar and set to drift just off the rock formation. Climbing through the boat he went to work preparing his bamboo rod and line. Fishing suited Pi Leung well. There was meditative state he achieved, spooling the line onto the wooden reel, threading it along the pole and eventually eye balling it through a hook and tying it off. Pi’s weathered fingers worked like a skilled guitarist plucking or strumming a single string.

Today's target fish was the wild yellow croaker, so beloved by gourmets and guaranteed to bring in the best price. Ordinarily, Pi would be joined by his son and along with other boats. They would trawl the outer shoals of the Pearl for the once plentiful fish. They would actually listen for the fish. The yellow croaker has a sonic muscle for bouyancy control. When a school passed by, the fishermen by listening carefully, could hear the fish even be able to tell which direction they were heading and where to cast their nets. No one knew why fish yields have not been as plentiful of late, and with his son away, Pi knew he needed other places to make his catch.

Usually worn to protect from the sun, the brim of Pi’s triagular dǒulì dripped with the last few raindrops of the day landing in the bit of water that had gathered on the floor of the skiff. The cold puddle chilled his sandaled feet providing him an alertness to complete his preparation despite an underlying weariness. Pi Leung made his way to the bow of the boat. In wide whipping arcs the bamboo pole whistled in the air, creating the only noise in the immediate area. A final whip sent the bait and hook sailing thirty yards out from the boat dropping it straight down to land on the water’s veneer, sending concentric circles rippling out like a flower rapidly blossoming. The line itself lay gently down on the surface until the weight of the hook submerged it beneath the dark waters.

Pi barely had time to sit when the tip of his rod vibrated and he felt a bump on his pole. He held his breath awaiting another bump. It came, slightly smaller than the last. Pi sensed a fish was inspecting the delicious larvae trying to make a decision. There was a third pull on the line and instinct took over as Pi locked the bail by yanking the pole up and back while setting a foot to the bow’s front seat.

What happened next caught Pi completely off guard. The line went rigid, the pole bent in a bow-like arch. The whole rig was thrust from his hands. The pole was in danger of going straight overboard when the reel itself caught the edge of the wooden seat. The seventy year old man’s hat fell off as he lunged forward and grabbed the pole, his frail body splayed across the boat. The line was taut and now the boat started to move. Whatever fish Pi had on the end of the line, it was large. It was now pulling him and his boat around the turtle shaped boulder in circle after circle leaving a much bigger wake than the one he arrived with.

Pi’s years of experience kicked in. He managed to pull back on the pole and use that tension to lift himself to his feet. He took a step forward and then lowered himself into the wooden slat of a seat. He pressed his cold, numb, sandaled feet against the bow and leaned back as he started to reel in line. The boat no longer encircled the rocks. It was heading across the reservoir for the opening of the canal. Pi sensed if it eventually got to open water he might lose the fish. In a series of rocking and reeling motions, Pi pulled the fish closer and closer to his skiff.

The smooth waters ahead exploded as a fish, three meters long and bright as gold, broke the surface and flayed trying to shake loose the hook from its mouth. The spray from the splashdown wet Pi’s face. Fifty yards from the canal entrance the boat drifted almost slowing to a stop. The fishing line hung straight dow. Pi knew he had exhausted the fish. By the soreness of his own muscles he knew he wasn’t in much better condition.

Now it was just about hauling up the dead weight. Maybe it was only 50 pounds but at this part of the fight it felt like one hundred and fifty. Pi looked down into the inky depths and he saw it coming to the surface like a golden treasure.

It was the largest croaker he had ever seen in his life, only this one wasn’t yellow, it was gold. And not the gold of some carp or goldfish, this was a glittering gold, like a temple idol. Pi wasn’t sure if his net was big enough to bring it aboard. He reached for his gaff and hooking it by the mouth raised it and dumped it onto the floor of the boat.

“Ow! That hurt!” A voice protested.

Startled, Pi stumbled backwards dropping the gaff and fell into the well of the boat. Pi popped his head up and scanned the lake looking for the source of the voice. It was empty.

The fish flopped and spun in a circle. “What did I ever do to you?”

Pi’s sense of reality was rocked by waves of confusion. “Y-You can talk?”

“Several dialects of Mandarin if necessary. Now do me a favor, remove this hook and let me go back into the water.”

Pi looked at the talking fish, at the water, and back to the fish. “No way. I cannot do that.”

“Why is it you cannot let me go? Simply remove the hook and toss me overboard.”

“I need the money. A fish your size will bring me more than enough.”

“I am not just any fish, can you not see this?”

“True. I have never met a fish that speaks. Also, your Golden hue is much more impressive than the pale yellow croakers I normally catch, plus your size is incredible.”

“That is because I am a magic fish! My magic comes from the unrequited hopes and dreams of the villagers of Turtle Rock lost in the flood.”

Pi had heard the legends of haunted, magical fish who took on the spirits of the lost souls when the reservoir was formed.

“What kind of magic is it of which you speak?”

“I can grant thee a wish! Any wish your heart desires. You say you need money? Release me and I shall fill your boat with gold from stem to stern.”

Pi Leung was no one's fool. He had heard, even told, his share of fairy tales and legends to know one thing; every story comes with a price.

“You think me a fool, Golden Fish? I no sooner release you and have my wish granted that the weight of the gold you give me sinks both me and my boat. I have no desire to join the other ghosts at the bottom of this reservoir. You’ll have to do better than that! My grandson is sick with fever.”

“There you go! What does your grandson suffer from? Wish for a cure and I shall grant it. Once you return me to the water, of course.”

“I’m not sure, it could be measles. Couldn’t you just give a blanket cure?”

“I prefer to be specific.”

“I know why. You will magically cure him of measles while being sure he catches malaria at some point. I’ve learned many years ago, careful what you wish for.”

“Okay, how’s this? Wish for your grandson to be cured and live a long healthy life. No strings attached there.”

“That sounds fair.”

“But you must toss me back first. You must trust me. And you must hurry.”

Pi Lung looked the magical fish in the eyes. It’s gills sucking in air waiting for it’s arches to collapse. He bent over and pried the hook from its jaw. “Better?”

“Much.” The fish answered.

Pi Leung cradled the fish and lifted it and stepped to the side of the boat readying to toss the fish back.

“It’s my dream to teach my grandson to fish. I can’t wait to bring him back here and tell him the story of how his life was saved.”

The fish looked up at Pi. “Wait a minute. I never said anything about you and him ever fishing together.”

Pi frowned.

It was late afternoon and the Leung family shanty was alive with the sound of a child playing. The smell of shrimp sauce made from milkfish filled the house. Eight-year-old Yung Leung, played with a spinning top on the floor setting it to bowl over wooden carvings of Chinese soldiers his grandfather had made for him. His mother, Lee, sewed quietly near a futon. The door opened and Pi’s son, Wong, home for a few days, entered bearing gifts. They ran to the young father and hugged in a ball of warmth and the joy being reunited brought. Wong looked up. “Where’s father?”

Lee looked to the ground. “Yung had a terrible fever last night. It broke in the morning but not before your father insisted on fishing despite the rains.”

Wong looked anxious. “And?”

Yung smiled and said, “When he got back he kicked us all out of the kitchen insisting he was going to make us the best dinner we ever had.”

With that, the door to the kitchen swung open, Pi Leung gestured for them to come. “Welcome home son! You’re just in time for the feast! Let’s eat.”

On the kitchen table on a wooded platter lay the largest fish any of them had ever seen, surrounded by vegetable garnish and drizzled with shrimp sauce, the golden color of the magical fish hadn’t lost it’s hue in the baking process. It's eyes, dead, stared up with a look of surprise. Lee spoke up. “That is too much for us to eat alone! We should invite the relatives over.”

In these Chinese fishing villages where each shack balanced on pylons lean and are pressed up against each other, everyone knows everyone and everyone is considered a relative.

"Relatives?" Pi Leung sighed, “Next time I’ll be more careful what I fish for.”

by Wilkinson Riling

What’s your favorite cookie?

Mine? To the detriment of my waistline, I love them all; chocolate chip, oatmeal, macarons, black and white, Pecan Sandies, Vienna Fingers, Nilla Wafers (wafers are just crackers aspiring to be something more than just a cracker), shortbread, gingerbread, sandwich cremes, peanut butter, coconut, Fig Newtons, mallomars, all varieties of the sugar stuffed goodies the Girl Scouts offer. Except for thin mints, I never developed a taste for those. Something about the menthol I find jarring, it counters the velvety richness of the dark chocolate and sometimes feels like Vick’s Vapor Rub filling my nostrils. I find Thin Mint’s popularity puzzling. But I digest, I mean, I digress…

The fact is, putting one cookie above the rest by flavor can be daunting. As of this writing, I would say for myself, the Oreo is king, with chocolate chip standing close in line in succession. Fresh from the oven C.C.’s could easily usurp my current reigning confection. Since favorite cookie status could change depending on whether it’s freshly baked or pre-packaged, for argument’s sake, let’s stay with store bought cookies for this discussion. It’s with those factory baked, processed goodies that I discovered a unique characteristic in my long love affair with the cookie allowing me to have a favorite in all cookie situations.

For, no matter what kind, there exists a cookie that earns, deserves and receives my utmost respect. A respect formed from gratitude. I speak, of course, of the Keystone Cookie. What, might you ask, is the Keystone Cookie? It is the Gunga Din of baked treats which I treat with a solemn reverence.

The Keystone Cookie is the very first cookie your fingers pinch to remove from the tray. It creates the space that now allows for a complete cookie assault. With its removal, you are free to inflict any amount of damage you choose to bring down upon the freshly opened package. Whether grabbing only a few or seizing something the size of a professional gambler’s stack of poker chips, a fist full of cookies, if you will. The Keystone Cookie is the first cookie “Over the top!” from the crammed trenches of the sandwich tray. It may appear to be a chance selection, but trust me, despite the randomness, this is a brave cookie.

To begin with, this cookie has to face the fact it will be the first victim consumed and washed down your gullet in a torrent of milk.

Secondly, the remaining cookies undoubtedly see it as the “Judas Cookie.” The betrayer in the tray. To them, it leaves the gate open for the barbarians to pillage and plunder rest of the cookie village.

There’s no going home for this cookie. If you were to try to return it back to the package for some reason; say for instance, it’s midnight and you hear your spouse stirring while you’re sneaking a late night snack, one might try to shove it back before being caught snacking. You can be sure that the Keystone Cookie will crumble from the tight squeeze brought by the anger, rejection and pressure from the other cookies. In short, the Keystone Cookie faces stresses no other cookie faces.

You won’t find a Keystone Cookie in a cookie jar. Cookie jars are for wusses. In a jar, it’s every cookie for himself, clinging to the sides in the darkness, burrowing to the bottom, pushing their comrades to the top. Going stale before their time. Laying willy-nilly, waiting to be abducted one at a time. No uniformed stacking, no structure. No, “We’re all in this together” motto. Pure cookie anarchy. You can keep your stinking cookie jars.

These are the reasons I hold the Keystone Cookie in such high regard. It’s why I believe it would be cruel, forcing such a cookie to have to watch as I devour his former friends. Tearing their heads off and licking their double stuffed innards like a toddler with a large lollipop. Or made to watch as I dunk a single cookie in milk, removing it, then consuming it, half drowned, and barely holding together. Or smushing two cookies together like conjoined carnival twins. The Keystone Cookie deserves better.

In the end, as I reach for the Keystone Cookie, it's not merely a snack I seek, but becomes a moment of communion. With each bite, it's as if I partake in a sacred ritual, a baptism in milk that sanctifies the cookie-eating experience. For in the simple act of enjoying this brave yet humble treat, I find a moment of bliss, a respite from the chaos of the world, and a celebration of life's simple pleasures.

So, dear reader, the next time you select that solitary Keystone Cookie nestled snuggly in the tray, take a moment to appreciate its significance. Recognize it not just as a mere cookie, but as a symbol of unity, sacrifice, and the joy of indulgence. For in the humble Keystone Cookie, we find not just a treat, but a reminder to always make room for a little extra sweetness in our lives.

That’s the way the Keystone Cookie should crumble.

“911 What is your emergency?” The stoic female voice crackled from a cellphone speaker.

With trembling hands, thirty-nine-year-old Megan Lowry’s finger fought to lower the sound on her Android. She had dialed 911 after clearing her head, trying to absorb her current situation. Holding the phone close to her mouth she whispered in high pitched staccato breaths. “Hello? You have to help me! I’ve been car jacked!”

Lit solely by her phone, Megan lay balled up in the dark confines of the trunk of a car, her own car. A bag of groceries she had just purchased were spilled open behind her. She could feel the moisture on her back from crushed eggs. Several bottles of

Vitamin Water rolled whenever her car made a sharp turn. A tire iron beneath pressed into her hip. The smell of exhaust lent a weight to the hot air she took in with every panicked breath. Megan fought an urge to cry. She whispered again into the phone. “Please, you have to help me.”

A robotic voice replied. “Try to remain calm. What’s your name?”

“Megan. Megan Lowry. I’m locked in the trunk of my own car.”

The voice registered a slightly more human tone. “Megan, I’m Sheila, I’m here to help you. You say you’ve been abducted, yes?”

“Yes. Yes. I stopped for groceries. I was putting them in my trunk when someone attacked me from behind. I was struck on the head. I woke a minute ago in the trunk of my own car!” With her free arm she felt for the walnut sized bump on the backside of her skull. She rubbed it, too scared to feel the pain.

“Can you speak up, Megan. I’m having trouble hearing you.”

Megan dared not to. “I can’t. I don’t think he knows I have my phone. I don’t want him to hear me.”

“Okay, okay. I understand. Tell me what kind of car you have, Megan.”

“A Toyota Camry. 2001, White. Please help me.”

“White Camry. Toyota. Got it.”

Desperation clung to each whisper. “Can you send the police? Can you track my phone?”

“That’s what we're working on Megan.”

“Hurry, please!” Her voice breathless now.

“I need you to focus, can you do that, Megan?”

“I can try.” Her whisper squeaked.

“Do you know your license plate number?”

“Yes. KEMY5T3. California plates”

“K-E-M-Y-5-T-3, is that right, Megan?”

“Yes. It’s…” Megan stopped as the car came to a halt. Perhaps her abductor heard her, Megan couldn’t be sure. “Sssshhh! Be quiet. We’ve stopped.”

Megan heard bells begin to ring in a back-and-forth cadence. The rhythm was familiar to her. The next sound confirmed what she suspected. The sound of rumbling thunder caused the whole vehicle to vibrate. She couldn’t see it. She heard the rolling freight

train lumbering through a railroad crossing. Megan knew of tracks on the far side of Glendale that ran North and South. She now believed she was heading East out of Glendale towards Pasadena so she couldn’t have been unconscious long. It took a solid three minutes for the clackety-clack of the train to pass and the warning bells to fall silent. She guessed the barrier lifted when she felt the car jolt forward and the tire iron dig into her hip as she bounced while the car crossed over the tracks.

From the trunk, Megan felt her car bank, taking on an incline and gaining speed. She was certain they were on a freeway entrance ramp curving to enter a stream of California traffic heading for God only knows where.

She whispered again. “Sheila, we’re getting on the freeway. I can feel it.”

“I’m here, Megan. The highway patrol’s been notified. We already have an Amber Alert out.”

“An Amber Alert?” Megan’s unease pinched her stomach. A thousand panicked thoughts filled her head. “He can read those signs too. Won’t he wonder how it was reported so fast? What if he figures out I have a phone? There’ll be no way for you to find me.”

Sheila attempted to reassure her. “We’re using our Enhanced 911 system. We’re already triangulating your location through the cell tower your phone is using. We should have your approximate location momentarily.”

Megan hissed. “Approximate? I need you to find my exact location now!”

Sheila returned to a professional tone. “Megan, focus. You’ve got to keep your wits about you.”

Megan snapped back. “I’m sorry, Sheila. I don’t get car jacked every day; you know?”

No answer came back. “Sheila?” Worried her tone offended the operator, Megan shook her phone, frantic to get a response. “Sheila?” Again, no answer. She felt the car slowing down. She heard horns honking outside the car. The blaring sounds seemed to echo and bounce back upon themselves; then muffled, as if they were in a tunnel.

Megan whispered a single word. “Bridge.” It was the only answer she could think of why she lost her connection. There were no tunnels she knew of near Pasadena. There were a number of bridges crisscrossing the freeway. Megan could tell the traffic must

be moving at a crawl under a bridge, or a series of bridges.

The point was moot. Her phone had no signal. Megan felt a pang of abandonment, a loneliness not dissimilar to the one she felt about the divorce she was currently going through, but given her present situation, much worse. She was beginning to think maybe whispering wasn’t the best strategy. Megan thought maybe to start

yelling or screaming. Perhaps someone in the slow-moving traffic would hear her. She could kick the trunk hatch to attract attention.

Before a decision could be made, Megan heard the sound of a siren in the distance growing louder and getting closer. For the briefest of moments, she wondered it were the police coming to her rescue. Maybe they triangulated her location. Maybe they set up a roadblock to slow traffic. Maybe the Amber Alert worked after all.

The many maybes were answered when the siren blared past her and drowned out like a dying cat just ahead. The smell of gas fumes, oil and radiator steam entered her confined space. From outside, Megan could hear the electronic garble of emergency radio calls. She visualized an ambulance arriving at a terrible car accident on the freeway. They must be passing the scene and the looky-loos brought traffic to a crawl. She wanted to scream. Fear held her frozen in place. Megan felt the fractional G-force as the car accelerated and traffic resumed its normal flow. Megan whispered. “Sheila?”

Silence hung in the air. The bars were empty. She couldn’t connect with a tower. Megan held the phone in two hands, her thumbs went to work. She decided to send a text. But to who? Megan scrolled through her recent contacts. There was her boss at ChemGen, Mike Rafferty, useless for the most part. Then her current boyfriend, Nelson Wickland, patent attorney she met at a ChemGen conference; Nelson was arranging the legal papers for a new chemical compound the pharmaceutical would be releasing revolutionizing cancer treatment. She met Nelson over a month ago. She had been sleeping with him several times already. He was the first man she shared a bed with after her separation from her ex. She wasn’t in love, but she was lonely. She needed the feel of a man to hold. Nelson was, intelligent, successful and a gentleman. Then she saw Jake Lowry’s number, her soon to be ex. Megan would never have left Jake had she not found evidence of him cheating. Receipts from hotels, motels, romantic restaurants, a cabin in Big Bear, sexual texts on his phone. She was deeply hurt and divorce at the time seemed her best option. She exhaled, then text what might be her final message.

It was to Jake. She figured a fifteen-year-old marriage must have meant something. Megan remembered the instant chemistry they had when they first met at Stanford. Her text explained her current situation clearly as possible, ending that if she survived this encounter, they might give it another try.

Two bars blinked on and off on the phone like the pulse of an emergency room patient crashing. Megan hit send. The message buffered trying to connect with a faint signal. The wait seemed endless. Then the bars went solid. The text stopped buffering. It got sent and the phone vibrated. Caller ID read, 911. Megan answered in a whisper. “Sheila?”

“No, Megan this is Officer Lancer with the Barstow Highway Patrol. Sheila connected us when your signal returned. We have a good idea where you’re located. Are you injured?”

She whispered. “Other than the bump, I’m not injured, but the road we’re on now is bumpy as hell.” She stopped. The car began to slow, gravel could be heard crunching beneath the wheels then went silent at full stop. Megan's heart raced. "We stopped!"

The engine shut down with a sputtering cough. She heard the driver’s door open with a popping creak and felt the car jostle as the driver climbed out. The door closed with a thud she that she could feel in her chest. She rolled on her side, shoved the phone in her pocket and faced the trunk latch.

The phone was her lifeline. She would protect it until the end. A key jostled outside. A click. The trunk sprung open. A flashlight beamed in her face. She tried to glimpse the car jacker’s face. Her kidnapper lowered the light.

It was Nelson Wickland, the man she had been sleeping with for the past two months. “You? Nelson, what the fuck are you doing?” She started to climb out, a raised revolver stopped her forward motion.

“Your phone, Megan. Give me your phone.”

Her phone? No way. Her phone was Sheila. Her phone was Highway Patrol. Her phone was GPS, her only way to be located. “What phone? I don’t have a phone.” She tried to look incredulous. “What I have is this nasty bump on my head, thank you. Why are you doing this?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. Now give it.”

Megan shrugged holding out empty hands.

Nelson’s voice went grim. “Don’t make me hit you again. Phone.” He pocketed the light. Both were now bathed only in the red of the taillights.

“Nelson, I swear…” She couldn’t give up so easily.

Nelson chuckled. “Megan, you just text Jake. I can’t believe you suggested a reconciliation.” Nelson held up his phone, it showed her text.

“Jake? How...?” She stopped her question mid-sentence. Megan was a Stanford University graduate. It took less than a second for her to compute the scenario; Jake and Nelson are conspiring to kill her, but why? Fifty percent of community property? They’re both successful men. It made no sense. Then it hit her. The patent. Megan’s contract was written where she owned a percentage of any of ChemGen’s products she helped create. If the divorce went through before the patent was signed, Jake got nothing.

“Jake will be along. We’ll meet at our rendezvous tonight. A cabin in Big Bear. Now give me your phone before I beat it out of you...” He raised the gun again. “…Or something worse.” He held out a hand. “The phone.”

Megan hoped Sheila or the Highway Patrol cop was catching all of this. This was the final string of hope left on a tenuous safety rope. The man she married for fifteen years and the man she recently began sleeping with have plotted to murder her. The biggest shock was understanding the two men must have been lovers for some time. Which is why she never found whoever the "other woman” was.

Megan looked at the desert expanse where the car was presently parked. It was as fitting a place as any to match the hurt flooding over her and drowning her sense of self. She noticed the bars on the phone were blank. The battery near dead, the signal once again dropped. She had no idea if anyone heard anything. She held the phone out with great reluctance.

Nelson snapped it from her hand, shut it off, dropped it, crushing it beneath one of his twelve-hundred-dollar Oxfords.

That was it, he might as well as stepped on her heart. All her lifelines were cut. Megan was truly alone. She cowered elbow up, as Nelson slammed the trunk shut leaving her in choking darkness. She felt Nelson climb back into the driver’s seat. The engine hesitated to turn over then a wisp of carbon monoxide leaked through the trunk floor. The car began to move. Megan felt every bump on the desert road leading back to the highway.

From the interior front cab Led Zeppelin’s Dazed and Confused began to play loud. Megan guessed Nelson found her CDs in the driver’s console and was playing her 70’s song list. The percussion from the speakers throttled against the back seat making Megan feel each beat of bass like a small gut punch. Her favorite band now sounded like a death march dirge.

Music has the capability of dredging up memories from the mind’s deepest recesses. In the darkness, Megan’s thoughts drifted from her claustrophobic fear turning to early days with her father. He was the reason that rock ’n roll was as much a part of her DNA as her hazel eyes.

Professor Connor O’Conner, a science teacher at Stanford University, single father to a precocious, outgoing young Megan O'Conner, raised her to be independent, curious and an audiophile of 70’s music. If Classic Rock were the only category on Jeopardy, Megan would have been grand champion.

He also fueled her love of science, the direction her career took. He taught her simple experiments like how to make invisible ink from lemon juice, create a fireworks-like show in a glass filled with olive oil, water, and food coloring. Megan was not like most of the neighborhood girls her age who experimented with make-up, lipstick, and eye shadow.

She was eight when she got her first chemistry set. Nine when she almost set the house on fire mixing potassium permanganate crystals, glycerin, and water. Despite that, her father never scolded her. He just asked her to think. Always think.

He’d playfully tease her saying most little girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice, but she was different. She had her own special chemical make-up, equal parts Boron, Radium, Iodine, Nitrogen and Sulfur. At that age she knew he must be joking. The elements that made up humans were simple, Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium, Phosphorous, Potassium and Sodium. It wasn’t until she noticed the symbols on the periodic table that she understood her father’s joke.

(B), (Ra), (I), (N), (S). Brains.

Long ago he taught her to always rely on intellect. It’s why she became a chemist and a damn good one.

Megan snapped out of her reverie returning to her present dilemma. Zeppelin was still playing loud from the front cab. She got to work. She felt underneath for the tire iron wedged beneath her, taking the flat end, used it as leverage to pry open the rear taillight panel, timing it on each musical downbeat. She popped the panel, pulling the light from its mount. Stretching the wires, she brought the bulb into the tight compartment illuminating it like a Halloween haunt.

The music track up front changed. Golden Earring’s Radar Love thudded through the rear seat. It was to this rhythm that the car seemed to accelerate, and Megan got busier.

She reached for the grocery bag contents and began to forage. Picking up item after item, some she’d keep, others, toss in a corner. She found what she needed. 8 ounces of

olive oil, a shaker of Extreme Hot Cayenne Powder, a lemon, a bottle of Windex, black pepper. Megan found a funnel near an oil can where she stored the vehicle’s emergency equipment. She grabbed two road flares. She was ready to build her final defense.

Megan used the flat end of the tire iron to tear through a road flare. She grabbed the funnel, shoving it into the bottle of vitamin water. Into it she poured the contents of the flare. The Potassium Nitrate, Polymeric Resin and Strontium Nitrate would dissolve in water, while filtering Potassium Percolate into a crystal. She

needed something to sift out the crystals, but what?

Megan removed her bra as if she were Houdini escaping from a strait jacket. Using one of the brassiere’s cups, she poured the contents from the bottle, straining the liquid in a corner leaving only the Potassium Percolate crystals behind which now needed to dry.

She did this by utilizing the bra’s other cup allowing it to absorb any liquid. She reopened the Windex bottle, added the crystals making sure nothing touched her skin. Megan had just fashioned her own bottle of MACE. With the crystals the potency of this homemade pepper spray was multiplied threefold.

The music stopped. Nelson called out from the driver’s seat mockingly. “Honey, we’re home!” It was time to ready herself. The trunk ’s smelled like a meth lab crossed with a Chipotle restaurant. Megan hoped the fumes hadn’t seeped into the forward compartment. She knew this would have to be a complete surprise when they opened the trunk. There would be no testing of the spray lest she blind herself.

Megan turned her body to face the trunk latch, placing her feet firm against the trunk’s rear panel behind the fender. She lay in the cramped compartment like an astronaut in a capsule awaiting launch. She felt down to her side to make sure the second

flare was in place and within reach, as well as the tire iron. Igniting the flare could turn the flammable pepper spray even more deadly. She pulled the lightbulb from the wire plunging herself back into darkness. Megan gripped the spray bottle with two hands and readied for her defensive assault. She gave one final whisper, “C’mon. Bring it.”

The white Camry, rear right taillight out, sat idle outside a lone cabin. Jake stepped out from inside onto the porch. Nelson climbed out and the two men approached each other hugged, then kissed. Megan couldn't hear what they were saying. They turned their attention to the trunk. Noticing the rear light was out and exchanged glances. Jake inserted the key. Nelson raised his gun. Both stood at the rear ready to open the trunk.

The car's license plate, illuminated by a tiny bulb read, KEMY5T3 or “CHEMISTRY.” The very thing that brought them all together. Now all three awaited the outcome of the coming chemical reaction.

by Wilkinson Riling

“Greater churl was never known,

On this earth than Stingy John;

From his door the poor were turned,

Unrelieved, cursed and spurned…

…Then since Jack is unfit for Heaven,

And hell won’t give him room,

His ghost is forced to walk the earth,

Until the day of doom:

A lantern in his hand he bears,

The way by night to show;

And, from its flame, he got the name

Of Jack O’Lantern now...”

…From the poem

The Romance of Jack O’Lantern

by Hercules Ellis

For the past twelve years the Crow County Pumpkin Carving Contest has been won by one man, a peculiar man for sure, but with an artistry of sculpting the seasonal squash said to be unmatched by mortal men. That’s not to say Jack McCarver was not of this world, but he certainly appeared to be treated as supernatural by neighbors and townsfolk alike, a spookish conjecture speculated about for years to come.

Aside from his carvings, Jack Ichabob McCarver was a strange looking fellow in his own right. A circular head with the features of a ferret cramped into the center of his face, a set of gray eyes impossible of ever acknowledging each other due to the drift of his left one. A detectable odor of fermented pumpkin permeated his skin, made no wonder of why he was a bachelor. He lived alone. He didn’t speak much. His dress was not untypical for the region, jean overalls over a long john T- shirt. He balanced a wide brimmed farmer’s hat over straight black hair and work boots laced to the ankles. He stood a lanky six foot tall with long arms and large thin hands that one would expect to be more calloused, him being a farmer and such, but they were smooth as a surgeon’s hands and by the quality of his pumpkin carving, just as precise.

His farm lay on the outskirts of Crow, Idaho. There, he slaughtered his own pigs and chickens, drew milk from a lone dairy cow, but his specialty was that he grew his own pumpkins. His pumpkin patch was dedicated to growing the county’s best, not necessarily the largest pumpkins around. Each Halloween he seemed to prove that point when his crop sold out.

It was late October when I saw him as the perfect subject matter for a story for The Crow Caller, our town’s local newspaper. I had just started working for them only three months out of high school. I received one hundred dollars for a story I wrote in my school paper about the influx of migrant workers at the meat packing plant and how the industry was exploiting them by illegally hiring minors. Pretty heavy stuff for a high schooler, I know, but when my friend Eduardo Lopez suddenly stopped coming to class and I had learned why, I wrote the expose. The Crow Caller picked it up and reprinted it then offered me a job.

With Christmas coming up I needed another 100 bucks to get my girlfriend Sarah something nice. Halloween was right around the corner, and I thought why not find something not just seasonal but a bit scary to write about. There were many local legends about Jack McCarver the Pumpkin Carver.

As I noted earlier, Jack lived alone on his three-acre farm and was rare to venture far from it. Except every Halloween Eve his 1950’s Black Ford pickup truck would pull into the county fairgrounds for our annual Oktoberfest and deliver the last of his crop of pumpkins along with his haunting masterpiece of a Jack O’Lantern. The contest offered a $500 dollar prize, which Jack has claimed for the past dozen and one years.

His farm was at the end of a half mile of dirt road off the main highway. It consisted of a two story, asymmetrical, clapboard house with the gable at the front and a porch. The wood, grayed and weather beaten was built in the early part of the last century. The barn nearby just as gray but seemed to stand purely out of stubbornness rather than solid construction. Mailmen and Amazon delivery men practically threw the packages out of their trucks without stopping. People said he murdered his own parents and dines along with their corpses in the evenings like some kind of Norman Bates/Norman Rockwell supper.

Others say that they’re buried in his pumpkin patch and their spirit haunts each pumpkin grown. He sells his “haunted” pumpkins on a stand he constructed at the end of his driveway and it’s on the honor system. Leave the money, take a pumpkin. Nobody has had the guts to break the rule. Add to that the rumors he once cannibalized a census taker. Or when they went to cut his cable service, he hatcheted a cable man into pieces, or the tale of the missing girl scout troop fed to his hogs, cookies and all and you can see there were a lot of folktales behind the legend of Jack McCarver pumpkin carver.

My car was in the shop. It was a used Mini Cooper I purchased in Junior High and let’s just say it’s cost me a mini fortune in repairs. I had to borrow my sister’s bike, a yellow Schwinn Wayfarer step-thru with a back rack. The eight-mile trip to the McCarver place took about thirty-five minutes and I had left at four. In the back of my mind, I was hoping I didn’t catch him and his “Weekend at Bernie’s” parents just sitting down for dinner. Or him baking actual girl scouts into cookies. Or a half dozen other scenarios gleaned from ever Saw movie I ever watched. My goal was to interview him about his art, his pumpkin sculpting. Learn his process, tools he used and how he became so interested in the art form. Look, in Crow Idaho, how far you can spit is considered an art, this made pumpkin carving high art.

I arrived in time to see his black Ford pickup come barreling down his driveway and pull out in front of me and drive towards town. I didn’t even have time to call out “Mr. McCarver!” or “Slow down, you idiot, you almost hit me!” I watched as he disappeared into the distance. I looked at the lonely farmhouse, I know it’s weird, but the house gave off the same vibe you get seeing a puppy dog watch it’s master leave it behind chained to a tree in the middle of nowhere. The phenomenon's called pareidolia, seeing faces in everyday objects. This house looked sad. There was still light left to the day. I figured I could wait on the porch for his return.

As I sat on the weathered steps an autumnal wind blew steady across the porch, and I was startled by the creak of the front door. Either the wind had pushed it open, or someone was inside inviting me into the dark. The reporter in me took over and I did the thing they tell you never to do in horror movies; ask who’s there? Followed by the next mistake; go and find out who it might be. I stepped in and jumped at hearing a tea pot from the kitchen screaming it was ready. Remaining true to the trope, I went to investigate.

I stepped through the kitchen door relieved not to see his parents having tea and biscuits with rats crawling from their mouths. I turned off the gas under the teapot and watched the steam dissipate like a genie returning to its bottle. I thought I heard a sound. A knocking sound. It was coming from the basement. I open the door and flicked on the light switch. Nothing happened. Still, it was dark and spooky. I’m not going down there. Then as I closed the door, I noticed behind it on a shelf a lantern and a pack of matches. The house was getting darker by the second, against my better judgement, I lit the damn thing and reopened the damn door. I was thinking I would make an ace reporter someday or perhaps qualify to replace Freddy on Scooby Doo.

I crept down the basement stairs, only because the sound of every bending creak and crack demanded I creep. Surely, these were the original stairs from pioneer days when this farm must have been constructed and would give way at any moment. There was a smell of mildew and wet clay coming off the walls of stones placed in lazy patterns upon each other until forming what could loosely be considered a room.

Along the ceiling heavy wood beam rafters strained to keep the rest of the house from collapsing in. Wooden shelves of dust and cobwebs held and assortment of pottery, glassware, mason jars of varying sizes, paint cans, oil cans and miscellaneous items from decades ago. A small window was covered with dirt and dust so little light filtered through, especially this far into fall when the sun set around five. The outside wind was pushing against it causing the source of the original banging noise.

Past the shelving, in the center of the long basement, I made out what I thought was the shadow of a man hunched down. Stepping forward, my lantern illuminated a leg shape and then revealed the rest of what turned out to be a wooden table, or a work bench. On it, a perfectly shaped pumpkin still with vine attached, it looked to have been freshly picked from the patch. On the table on a leather bib spread out neatly by order of size, were what I guessed to be the tools Jack must use for his carving. There were metal sculpting loops, steel loops the size of a thumbnail attached to a wooden handle. An Exacto knife, a putty knife, a drywall saw with what looked like prehistoric teeth, a large spoon with serrated edges, kind of like a spork. Set apart and just above on the leather bib, a filet knife with a wood handle and intricate runes carved into it. It looked sharp enough to cut you by just looking at it.

I held up my lantern to a shock I will never forget. The bleak light from my lamp fell upon wooden shelves of about a dozen mason jars lined up in two rows. Each jar contained a liquid I guessed was formaldehyde. Floating in the liquid of each one was a severed head. Each head: eyes opened, mouth agape, features contorted. I stumbled back and almost fell into a cistern I hadn't noticed. I caught myself on the edge and turned to look down into the black abyss. Holding up my lantern, it revealed it to be about six feet deep. Any water once in there was gone, now replaced by bones, glowing yellow white by my light. Rib cages, and hip bones and femurs and fibulas piled a foot high in a heap. Some in various states of decomposition.

I looked back at the macabre pantry of beheaded people and realized at that moment what Jack McCarver’s secret of success was. Those winning entries he submitted each year in the Jack O’Lantern carving contest were not pumpkin carvings as you and I have come to know them, these were the death masks of his victims, carved with the same blade Jack used to carve up his victims. A filet knife of exquisite sharpness in the precise hands of a madman and his tools, a drywall saw used to behead and dismember, spoons to remove brains, sculpting loops to flay skin, the uses were infinite.

That’s when I heard the pickup truck outside. At least that was my guess. It certainly wasn’t an Uber driver come to pick me up. I put the wick out on the lantern and placed it on the shelf trying to hide it behind one of the grisly mason jars staring back at me. The room was now virtually pitch black and I needed to hide. I felt my way around the table over to the cistern. I climbed over the edge and lowered myself into the pile of death, decay and bone. Then I remembered my sister’s bike and realized I was screwed.

I heard the click of the light switch. The stairs creaked at a much quicker rate than when I took them, so someone had more confidence in them than I had. I tried not to breathe. Maybe he’ll check the rest of the house and I could make a break for it while he was upstairs. No such luck. The room lit bright, the new light even reaching into the pit. I pressed against the side of the cistern still in darkness. I peeked to see a lightbulb swinging from a ceiling wire socket. Did he just leave the farm to buy a lightbulb? No. That’s crazy.

Jack McCarver spoke to me. “You can come out now, young man.” The voice was frog throated and sounded as if it was dragged across sandpaper. I was ready to piss myself. I did not answer.

“Or I can drag you out.” His response to my silence.

I stuttered. “I… I’m coming out.” No sense in getting physical at this stage of our meeting. I stood crunching the bone and marrow beneath my feet. I was able to jump and pull myself up, claw over the rim of the cistern and with a thrusting scramble from my feet, roll onto the floor landing behind him. I stood, shaking, aware I was cold and sweating at the same time. I heard the sound I’ll never forget. Stainless steel piercing pumpkin. Chik! In this environment it was truly an unnerving sound.

McCarver continued, his back to me. “Do you hear that sound? Cold steel stabbing into this pumpkin? Listen as I slice its flesh to remove the top so I can spoon out the insides, gutting it into a hollow shell that will become my canvas.” He stop speaking so I could hear. There was a sucking sound as he pulled off the top. He spoke again. “Did you know stabbing a human has a very similar sound and feel to it”

I watched as McCarver removed the pumpkin’s insides with a spoon, scraping and shoveling a pile of pumpkin guts onto his work bench. “It’s that moment when I stab them when my models realize I intend to gut their very souls from them. That’s when I capture the expression needed to bring my sculptures to life.”

He turned to me holding up an unlit candle. The most important factor is the light.” McCarver lit the candle. You control the light by the depth of your carving, remove less here and more there and you create dimension, shading and shape to the art.”

McCarver set the candle down. “But the real secret? He began to pick seeds one by one out of the innards piled outside the pumpkins. These are the seeds I use for my next crop, the bloodline, so to speak, continues.” He opened his palm and showed me his “blood” seeds. He closed a fist and turned away.

He turned back to me. McCarver had picked up a knife. “Let me show you.”

I went to run, and he blocked the path to exit.

McCarver thrust his hand out, grabbing me by the neck and pinned me to the wall. I weighed half as much and a good six inches shorter. He banged my head against the wall with enough force to stun me close to unconsciousness. He spun me around locking my arms behind my back. I felt the tightening of a zip tie then spun back around to face him again.

His smile revealed teeth as crooked as a broken fence. He held up a blade. “This is a filet knife. It is used by the top chef’s in the world. You won’t feel a thing, at first.” Jack McCarver’s gray eyes were otherworldly, the pupils dilated to the size of a button with a black pigment found only in the coal mines of hell. His ferret sneer almost drooled as he pulled my shirt up and slowly began to push the knife into my gut.

He was right. Whether it was adrenaline or outright terror I didn’t feel it as inch by inch it sunk into my belly with the same sickening sound I heard earlier. My hands were locked together but I still had a free foot. I kicked at the shelving unit containing the heads and the lantern. A domino effect took place as mason jar bumped mason jar knocking the lantern down onto the candle. An explosion of flame distracted McCarver who pulled out the knife to attend to the fire. I dropped to a knee.

The Black and Decker drywall saw tumbled from the table to the floor laying teeth up. I dropped backwards onto it feeling the blades bite into my back. I gaged where a sawtooth was, using it to slice my plastic bonds.

McCarver almost had the fire out when I stood, and this time I pulled the shelves of the disembodied heads down. The jars burst open, and the formaldehyde exploded. I pushed through the growing fire knocking McCarver into the cistern, I made for the stairs holding my wounded torso tight. I heard him screaming but didn’t look back. The whole basement and its ancient artifacts were exploding and bursting into flame. The fire was racing across the rafters. I ran so fast I don’t remember touching the stairs so there was no fear of collapse.

I got safely to the kitchen. Before exiting I stopped at the stove and turned on the gas while putting the flame and pilot out with water from the nearby kettle. I let the gas run. I stumbled to the door, but not before the flames ripped out of the basement and now began to burn with purpose.

I crashed from the house holding my wound tumbling down the wooden porch stairs. My face connecting with hardened earth and dust. I could hear the flames crackle and snap behind me and feel the heat from the increasing blaze on my back. I crawled forward in pain and nausea. I tried to get as far away as possible. I tried to stand but continued to stumble.

Exhausted and losing blood I leaned on an elbow and turned to look back at the conflagration. Pareidolia. Same phenomenon, different image. The burning house took on the same orange glow of a jack o’lantern, the collapsing porch railings resembling McCarver’s own teeth. The hollowed darkness of the front door and empty second story windows formed the eyes and the nose. It looked like a demented Jack O'Lantern. As the house disintegrated, McCarver’s screaming stopped. Then came the explosion. The wooden house that had survived drought, floods, and neglect for over a century splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered in as many directions.

It only took about thirteen minutes for the emergency vehicles to show. I was lucky, the blade had missed perforating anything of life-threatening importance. I only lost a pint and a half of blood. I would be out of the hospital in a day. Plenty of time to write my article for the Halloween edition.

I was a town hero, reluctant, of course. I had been paid for my story and received even more notoriety when contacted by talk shows and podcasts across the country to retell the Halloween Legend of Jack McCarver. I was a celebrity and Sarah seemed pleased with that, insisting we attend Oktoberfest to know what it feels like to be treated like royalty. I prefer a quieter, humbler existence, but Sarah’s never even been out of Crow County, so I wanted her to feel special if that’s what she desired.

Besides, with the ghost of Jack McCarver’s evil doings behind us, the quiet hamlet of Crow, Idaho could return to the normalcy of beer drinking, pie eating contests and wearing lederhosen in October. I stopped to get Sarah a candy apple. I reached in my pocket for cash. I felt something strange. What I pulled out nearly stopped my heart. I had to get over to the pumpkin carving contest. I ran through the crowd pulling Sarah after me. We arrived at the display. I froze in place.

The center pumpkin on the top tier already had the first-place ribbon attached. The image carved so intricately, backlit with the amber glow of hot embers, detailed to perfection on the orb shape, with translucent highlights, was a face I can never get out of my mind. It was MY face. The face I must have had as Jack McCarver penetrated my abdomen with his filet knife and held it there waiting for me to realize I was about to die. A face twisting in fear, contorting in question and bewilderment. Despite the fact I fought back and survived, I knew he got from me what he wanted and now was taking first prize for a fourteenth year.

The entry was submitted by a Jim Smith who never claimed the prize. Only I figured out that "Jim" could be an acronym for Jack Ichabob McCarver. The Halloween legend lives on because of three things I knew to be true; Jack McCarver’s body was never found, the blade that did the bulk of his artistry is still missing and despite finding them only moments ago, I have no idea how thirteen pumpkin seeds ended up in my pocket.

by William Riling

Professor Carlton Evers, lost in numb thought, stared at the faded photograph pinched tight between his thumb and forefinger, asking himself in a near silent whisper over and over again, “What if?” “What if?” Two simple words repeating like the scratch of a record needle playing at the end of an LP. The photo in his hand was an old Polaroid, washed by sunlight, dried by the years, leaving behind contrasts one mostly finds in old-world watercolors.

The picture was of a young girl, tan and lithe, her sandy brown hair hung to her browned shoulders. Head tilted, she presented a smile that lit up her freckle kissed face while sparking a light in her electric blue eyes. Clad in a cream white bikini, as if she was posing for a postcard, she sat knees up, arms back, on a large beach towel bearing the imprint of a Union Jack flag. The towel’s design shouldn’t serve as a misdirection, the young girl was by no means British. She was from New Jersey. Had the photo also been able to capture her accent, you’d recognize it as very “South” Jersey. Carlton had won the towel for her from a boardwalk attraction on their very first date.

The photograph was of seventeen-year-old Lori Saunders, also known as Miss Ocean City ’83 and the focal point of Carlton’s summertime romance that same year.

In ’83, Carlton was eighteen years old and a summer season away from attending MIT that same year on a full scholarship. With all his obvious intelligence, it still puzzled the future physicist how he could end up in a summer romance with a girl as beautiful as Lori. What could she see in him? He was after all, a Star Wars geek, an Atari nerd who still lived with his parents, possessing the social skills of a leper in a nudist camp, and as he knew all too well, still a virgin. He was by no means competition for the bronzed surfers and college jocks trolling the beaches, bars and boardwalk scamming for summer tail.

Yet it was his boyish shyness combined with his razor-sharp intellect that attracted the young beauty to him. Plus, when Carlton looked at her, he didn’t leer, he didn’t salivate, he didn’t show off or put on airs. He was a good listener. She liked that about him.

They had met at the Borden Soft Ice Cream kiosk along the 6th avenue boardwalk. She was a server. His job was to sweep that section of the boardwalk, keeping the area free from trash. Each day while working he would spend his break time by ordering a cone from Lori. It was always vanilla, like his personality.

His breaks could barely be considered brief interludes within the number of working hours in a day. They were more like eye blinks, or snatches of seconds, just fleeting moments. Lori was usually busy tending to customers. Yet over time, their small conversations about the weather, trivial things and all things vanilla, somehow managed to morph into something more.

Soon their dialog grew into a past time they like to play together they called, “Local or Loco?” It was a game they invented where they’d guess where people were originally from by their appearance and dress. The fashions of the eighties didn’t make the guessing as easy as it may sound. Disco was dying and Goth/Punk growing.

Eventually, Lori began to take her break at the same time as Carlton. Like two game show contestants they would sit on a boardwalk bench looking and secretly pointing at the tourists. Each would give a theory on where that person was from and why they thought so. Usually, the outfits were a dead giveaway. Tight bathing suits, jewelry and platform shoes on legs with zero tan pointed to the Italian guys from New York. Beer guts, baseball hats, and double entendre T-shirts, meant a Philly native. Speedos were either Canadians or Europeans. Both Carlton and Lori got a lot of enjoyment when they would find out they were right after hearing the vacationers speaking with an accent or in a foreign language.

The fourth week of June in ’83 in Ocean City there was a triple feature on a Saturday playing at the Moorlyn theatre. It had been scheduled and sold out as early as May First. It was the first two Star Wars Movies followed by the premiere of Return of the Jedi. Carlton had purchased two tickets the day they went on sale. At first, he was going to take his younger sister Sam, but call it the Force, or what have you, Carlton drew the nerve to ask Lori to join him. She agreed.

It would be their first date and followed by their first kiss under the boardwalk later that evening. For all practical purposes, other than it being Carlton’s first true love, it would also be his first broken heart. That's the side of memory lane Carlton doesn’t drive on. Suffice it to say Carlton went to MIT that fall. He became a physicist, and later a tenured professor at the school, no less. Now middle aged, with glasses and a thinning hairline, the remaining tenacious strands of hair cling squid-like to the skull that contains one of the most incredible brains to ever grace the MIT campus. Professor Carlton Evers ended his reverie with a sigh.

“What if?” He finally said aloud, setting the photograph back beneath the push pin that held it to the partition by his office desk. Once a rhetorical question borne from regret, ennui and lost love, they became two words that triggered a longing that was soon to become a desire magically leading to an incredible idea. Those two minuscule words would inspire fifty-five-year-old physicist Carlton Evers to conceive and construct what he believed to be the world’s first working time machine.

He had gazed at the photo more than once over the years. So often the ink inscription left on it was barely legible. He wished with an aching heart that he could go back to that moment in time that, at least in his fading memory, were the happiest days of his life. He held before him an image frozen in time. A place and a moment never seen before or since, never to be repeated. It was a time capsule recorded by a light sensitive negative. That’s when the aging physicist began to daydream and question “What if?”

What if all the information of that day back in 1983 was encoded into that photograph the moment the picture was snapped? What if there was a way, perhaps with the aid of a supercomputer and laser, to break down and map all that information, down to the very atomic structure of every molecule, light particle and electron recorded?

Then, what if all that atomic data could be fused or compressed into one particle, perhaps by use of a Haldon Collider, accelerated to the speed of light opening a wormhole and then, like bouncing back a radio signal, return that molecular information to its original space and time then reverse the process to send it back?

Carlton knew he would need more than a faded Polaroid to extract that kind of imprinted data. Even though the photo’s zinc paper is treated with a glossy, protective overcoat of polycarbonate compounds, the actual image taken was recorded onto a light sensitive negative that is generally tossed away when the photo develops. Besides, he understood Polaroid’s film base is coated with layers of silver halide grades, image dyes and interlayers under a transparent cover sheet. In layman’s terms it would be like trying to extract data from a comic page image that had been transferred onto silly putty.

Carlton further reasoned that a film stock made of a cellulose acetate would be much more robust. Unlike nitrate which produces its own oxygen when immersed in water, thus making it unstable, even more flammable. Whereas, in a better stock of film, the silver salts are on the emulsion layer; the light sensitive materials are suspended in gelatin and coated onto the acetate. They have a Modulation Transfer Function absorption rate of 160 lines per millimeter. That MTF reads coarse and fine details much more naturally and organically than digital images which treat everything encompassed with the same unflinching eye, so light is not recorded as much as it is interpreted by digital camera software.

The end result from his nostalgic trip down memory lane; Professor Carlton Evers was on the threshold of discovering if a negative from a photograph might be the on-ramp to the expressway for time travel. That was the informal concept he took to DARPA, concluding it would take government funding to build such a device. He was surprised he received an answer within a month.

Now almost a year and a half and quarter of a billion dollars later, two men in dark suits and dark glasses, each with similar tightly cropped haircuts, entered MIT’s basement lab several steps ahead of a third man, also dressed for business, only in a lighter suit minus the sunglasses and carrying a steel attaché. In lockstep cadence, the group descended the spiral staircase down to the level where a brand-new ballroom sized Hadron collider stood behind a glass enclosed sterile chamber.

Standing upright within the enclosure was a large, circular, gold and silver coil-filled contraption, riddled with rivets, surrounded by tubes, conduits and brackets holding brackets, with cables and tubing snaking out from its base, looking like the maw of some mechanized beast from an AI generated image of alien machinery sucking down metallic spaghetti.

It had been eighteen months from when the original concept on a drawing board went to the finishing touches now being fine-tuned on Carlton’s… make that the United States Government’s, experimental time machine. However, no one was actually calling it that. Carlton took it upon himself and christened the device L.O.R.I., after his lost love or the Lightwave Origin Recapturing Interferometer. The anagram was a stretch for sure, but it wasn’t just an homage, it also served for secrecy, for nowhere in any schematic did they use the words, “Time Machine.”

Originally the experiment was to be simple. Take a photograph of your time traveler Tuesday morning in a room containing an object in a box. Take the negative of that photo on Wednesday and send the subject back in time. When they return, if they can tell you what was in the box, we’ll know time travel is possible. But after the expense laid out up until now, the government had much more ambitious goals in mind.

The two accompanying men took up posts on either side of the room as the man in gray set the briefcase down on a table. Carlton, dressed in PPE gear, stepped out from the collider compartment and over to his computer to input the initiating code. He opened a file, “Operation Lancer.” A code appeared. His fingers danced on the keyboard typing in a numeric prompt. The source code 20/63/327767/96.7970/^/1200 appeared skipping across the display screen. A red light began to blink on a nearby digital clock. A count down from 12 hours ticked away like a heartbeat.

Carlton then stepped over to his work bench where the mystery man known to him only as “Mr. X” had set the briefcase. The mysterious stranger then dialed in the combination. The man’s thumbs were scanned by a blue light on the edge of the latches that open the case. The light turned green, the case snapped open. The man in the gray suit turned the case to face Carlton. In the center of the case, a small white envelop lay in a postage stamp sized recessed space etched into a protective gun metal gray foam lining the case. With a pair of forceps, Carlton removed the envelope handling it it as if it were nitro glycerin. He turned, making for the sterile glass enclosure protecting the Hadron collider from foreign material and contamination. A motion sensor activated the door.

The second he stepped inside the glass door whooshed closed behind him He continued through the next to the gangway leading to the center of the coil. Arriving at the coil, there was a tray of tools on a table stand off to a side. Taking another forceps, he pried open the envelope and gingerly removed a small piece of brownish acetate. With a surgeon’s touch, he placed it on a clear glass plate about an inch by an inch and a half and slid the plate beneath his microscope. Carlton squinted one eye as he peered through the aperture, he brought the item into focus.

What first caught his attention was the white glare from two sprocket holes on the left side of an image. It was immediately apparent to Carlton that he was looking at a small piece of film. Framed by black, the color image was of a group of people lining a gray street corner surrounded by brown and cream-colored sandstone buildings. The crowd appeared to be awaiting a parade. The whites and reds of people’s shirts popped off of black silhouettes. An old-style streetlamp painted green stood sentry to the left. Located near dead-center of the still image, a motorcycle cop was negotiating a corner turn with another cycle cop out of focus behind him.

Professor Carlton Evers was looking at frame z007 of the Zapruder Film, one small piece from the 8 mm capture of the assassination of JFK. A much as he wanted to, Carlton’s time machine wasn’t sending anyone back to Ocean City 1983. This pioneering trip was sending someone to Dallas, Texas and the year 1963. What they hoped to accomplish was anyone’s guess, they insisted they were going back just to observe. The consensus was that every step short of not going was to be taken to avoid changing history. They wanted to know what they could do inhistory before they ever attempted to do anything to history. Carlton was beginning to think he knew how Oppenheimer must have felt.

Using forceps, Carlton removed the piece of film from the glass plating and lay it in a thumb drive sized compartment. He slid the component into a slot on a motherboard attached to the coil’s console and pushed it in. The room was configured as a smaller version of NASA’s mission control. Multiple computers activated at once and began processing at lightning speed. Lights in the basement laboratory dimmed, flickered and then returned as the computing task automatically drew its power from another outside source.

With its ethernet linked to the Frontier supercomputer in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the fastest, most powerful computer in the world, delineation of the data that was locked in the film negative would take a minimum of three hours to process. The image itself would be destroyed in the process by laser light atomizing the acetate causing a radioactive like decay. Carlton’s calculations left open the possibility this could affect the duration of the chronological expedition. There was no turning back. The countdown was set.

Carlton Evers wasn’t going to be making this trip back in time and he wasn’t happy about his role but understood someone had to steer the ship. DARPA insisted on providing their person to make the trip. The mysterious man who delivered the single frame of the Zapruder film was to be the first experimental “Nanonaut.” It was a term DARPA coined, combining the term “nanotechnology” to the word “astronaut.” Clever people, those government spooks.

Carlton Evers had many questions but was so wrapped up in the complexity of the launch he hadn’t had time to sort through them. Now with the film frame in place, the computations processing and the power stabilized, he took a moment to think.

Why choose the Kennedy assassination for “Operation Lancer?” Lancer, he learned, was the code name the secret service detail had given Kennedy all those years ago. But why choose that moment in history? They could, if there was 8mm color film of Nazi Germany available, and there was, go back and try to stop Hitler before he painted his first watercolor. Before he sent six million people to their deaths. Or they could choose to go back to 9/11 and save thousands from a horrific ending. Then there were the existential questions that arose automatically.

Carlton continued to posit. Say you did stop Hitler; who is to say a more effective fascist wouldn’t rise to power? Someone more tactical, more hateful, more efficient than him? Or what if you stopped 9/11 in 2001 only to have a dirty bomb placed there in 2002 and kill three times as many people? There it was, that nagging “What if” question again. A billion possible outcomes and a billion possible mistakes.

Add to it all the possibility that maybe all you’re doing is creating an offshoot reality. A parallel universe, existing in its own space/time continuum. Would you no longer exist in the former? Does it just become another bubble in the multiverse? What if you crossed paths with your younger self? Unknowingly brought Covid back in time with you? Stepped on a butterfly? It was enough to think oneself into a headache. It didn’t matter, the clock was ticking. As the saying goes, time waits for no man. It was almost time to prepare the traveler.

The decontamination chamber was an anti-room off the back of the basement. The stark white sterile environment contained a hospital bed, side tables, medical monitors, clean towels and sheets, a shower and a flat screen TV for the Nanonaut to watch while waiting for final countdown.

In an open closet hung a gray, Beau Brummell men’s suit and matching tie from the 60’s, like something straight from the wardrobe department of the TV show Mad Men. They found it in a vintage clothing store in Kansas. A Trilby hat from the same era, purchased in a Seattle flea market, hung on a hook. A pair of black sued lace up Oxfords were discovered in Vermont, polished sat on a shelf along with an Omega Speedmaster watch purchased on eBay. Every item was manufactured in the sixties. Carlton felt this would help make a smoother transference having atomic similarities to the destination year while helping the time traveler visually fit into the era.

The Nanonaut, Mr. X, was currently in the MIT cafeteria having a final meal with the launch crew before his journey. The fare was bullion, tofu with a little chicken meat added out of sympathy. Carlton was doing last minute tests on the heart monitor and ekg machines, syncing them to the main system. They record the body’s reactions up until the last second.

Carlton reached to calibrate the monitor; he bumped a side table. The attaché popped open an inch. Why something so secure was left unlocked aroused Carlton’s curiosity. With furtive glances to make sure no one was watching; he opened the case. He found the reason it wasn’t closed properly. The gray foam that protected the frame of film was pried up and askew. Carlton peeked under the material.

Laying beneath that foam on a thinner layer was a High Standard HD 22., the CIA’s weapon of choice. A silencer, shoulder holster and portable aluminum stock sat alongside it. He reset the foam the way he found it. Carlton realized this was no DARPA scientist they were sending back in time. This man was CIA through and through.

Carlton began to rifle through rest of the suitcase’s sleeves. He found a Manila envelope. He hesitated a beat and opened it. In it was a three-page dossier with the title “Operation Lancer” stamped across it the words, “TOP SECRET.” The first page had a picture of a young man in jacket and tie and hair cropped like Mr. X’s. The info stated the man’s name was Jack Kyleford.

Carlton wondered if the man was any relation to Presidential candidate John Kyleford, the Republican front runner for President. But it couldn’t be. This man’s age was listed as 24. Height, 6 foot, 0 inches, weight 202. Vice President John Kyleford was thin, barely six feet tall and 82 years old. There was a serial number followed by the words “Operation Mongoose.”At the end of this man Kyleford’s bio, the words, “INTERCEPT/TERMINATE.”

On the second page a photo was pixelated, the bio was redacted with swaths of black ink covering most of the copy. Still, Carlton recognized the silhouetted form as Lee Harvey Oswald. The three names were blacked out as well as his serial number. It was also followed by “Operation Mongoose.” There was no instruction after his name. It read: D.O.A.

The final page and photo took Carlton’s breath away. It was from his MIT I.D. It had a few lines of biographical information containing his name and social security number followed by the words, “Operation Lancer” and the instruction, TERMINATE. He had to read it several times as he stared at the word then back to his photo.

Carlton shoved the pages back into the envelope with an unsteady hand but forgetting the sleeve he took them from, he jammed them into the first one and closed the attaché. His heart moved like a thumping rabbit’s foot. Adrenaline raced through his nervous system.

“Holy fuck. The CIA want me dead.” A thousand thoughts crowded for attention. Why kill me? Was the assassination a CIA plot? Was Mr. X on the grassy knoll? Did they kill Oswald? Kennedy? Who is Kyleford? Perhaps he’s the second shooter? What is “Operation Mongoose”? He couldn’t let the test continue, could he?

Carlton turned to the gray suit hanging on the rack, then out through the window of the decontamination room door. He saw the collider still counting down. One did not have to be a physics professor to add together what he was thinking at that moment.

Carlton changed clothes as if he was late for his own wedding. The arms of the Beau Brummell suit coat rode up above his wrists revealing the white sleeves of the pressed dressed shirt he just buttoned. It was a tight fit. He surprised himself when he remembered how to tie a Windsor knot, which he was now doing at breakneck speed; Cross wide end over narrow, loop, cross again, loop, pass wide end through loop and pull.

“Close enough” he thought as he shorted the front part. The pant legs revealed a little too much ankle, but the argyle socks were doing their job, so it wasn’t too noticeable. He strapped on the wristwatch laying on the table and checked the time. It was synched up with the computer in the other room. Carlton stepped to the mirror and put on the charcoal Trilby with a red and gray hat band. Looking like he stepped out of a 1960’s cigarette ad, he started for the door and paused. He had one more accessory to consider. He stepped back to the suitcase. Lifting the foam he considered the gun in its suppressor-ready shoulder holster. Carlton removed his jacket one last time.

A minute later, Carlton stepped out of the decon chamber and crossed toward the main computer bank. He removed his hat, sat and took up pen and pencil. He began writing a few calculations on a clipboard. He was going to have to help the Frontier computer speed up its processing time. There were still a good three hours before operational initiation. He needed to go in the next three minutes. It was almost time for Mr. X and his team to begin preparation. They could arrive any moment. Carlton typed in the new source code instructing the power surge protectors that controlled energy flow to seek more of it.

Several crypto mining warehouses in the mid-Eastern United States suddenly went offline. The computers in the control room lit up like tilting pin ball machines. Carlton put on his hat. He kissed the photo of Lori taped to the control console. “Wish me luck.” He made for the Haydon Collider. “I’m going to need it.” He had no plan other than making sure no CIA Nanonaut would have a chance to fuck with history.

Stepping into the center of the Hadron ring, Carlton stood in place watching the sequence wind down from twenty seconds. Large coils behind him began to rotate in opposite directions speeding up with a growing electronic whine like a propeller to a large B-17 spinning to life. Had he spread his limbs, He would have looked just like DaVinci’s Vitruvian man.

Beneath the noise Carlton could hear muffled shouting. He saw Mr. X and his CIA compatriots scrambling down the spiral staircase, this time in a more herky-jerky stumbling manner. The inside chamber began to spark and flash like a Tesla Coil gone crazy. Blue electrical charged lighting flayed out in all directions. The concentric coils of the collider now all seemed to be spinning in the same direction. The noise reached the level of a jet engine. Carlton began to feel a G-force unlike anything he could imagine. Like his whole body was being squeezed in a vice made from broken glass. The pain felt like a dental drill digging into a raw nerve and that nerve happened to be his whole body. He tried to scream but that was sucked back into him like a vacuum. There was a blinding flash, he was gone.

What no one could tell Carlton about his time travel theory was, not if it is possible but, what if his theory works? What happens when the very matter that makes up each atom in the body, where the corporeal casing that keeps your consciousness bottled up, is instantaneously disassembled, squeezed through a space time continuum at the speed of light, transported by worm hole or a tear in space/time itself and reassembled to different time and place. Would anyone survive such a journey? How is such travel possible if the earth, a ball spinning through space, was in a completely different location in its orbit back in 1963? Would he end up floating somewhere along the orbital path marooned in the cold void of space? Carlton was about to find out.

The next thing he remembered was a feeling of nauseousness. An upset stomach was the least of the results of this trip. The pain he initially felt disappeared as quickly as it began, replaced by tinnitus, but this ringing in the ears produced more of a high-pitched whine, leaving Carlton virtually incapacitated and unable to move for the first thirty-seconds of his arrival in 1963. Add vertigo and an uncontrollable need to projectile vomit into the mix and they’re side effects no amount of Dramamine can diffuse. But where was he?

Carlton leaned against a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air warm to the touch from the mid-day sun. Judging by the make and model years of the other cars in the lot, He knew he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. After losing the contents of his stomach behind the car, Carlton steadied himself and stood to get his bearings. The day was warm, the sun shined bright, but something was off. He was standing in a parking lot behind the Texas School Book Depository. He could see the back of the Hertz Rent a Car billboard atop the building. The tinnitus was dissipating but there was a strange sound in the air, like a humming or a dull droning, like background noise at a ballgame mixed with something like white noise from a TV receiving no signal. Nothing was moving. Nothing.

He looked up to see a small flock of blackbirds frozen in place in the air. There was a large freight train on the railroad track behind him looking normal save for the static plume of steam perched still and stationary above the engine. Several people stood statue like in mid-step heading in his direction. Carlton had traveled back in time only to arrive at a place where time was frozen as well as everything else. This made no sense to Carlton’s knowledge of physics or quantum mechanics. It was as if he arrived in an actual still frame from history. “Unless…” he thought, “…We truly are living in a simulation.” If that were the case, Carlton Evers may have stumbled upon one of the greatest revelations to human existence. Before he continued with that realization, something caught his eye.

There were a few people alongside a fence to the right of the building, one man stood out. Dressed similarly to the ill fitted suit he now wore; a man was lighting a cigarette with a match cupped in his hands. Carlton moved in for a closer look.

The ground was a little unsteady for him, Carlton appeared to choose a path to the man a wino might take, swerving side to side until he gained his equilibrium. The tinnitus let up and was now at a level the same as the background noise filling the air. He approached the stranger, whose head was tilted, ready to light the smoke. Carlton recognized him instantly. It was Jack Kyleford, the man from the dossier. Carlton wasn’t sure if Kyleford could see him. It was a bizarre feeling getting no reaction not even an eyeblink at a finger snap. It was as if Kyleford was hypnotized, or Carlton was invisible.

Carlton needed to confirm the man’s identity. He noticed the man’s raised arms created a slight hitch on the suit jacket exposing his waist. Carlton could make out a badge clipped to the agent’s belt. On it, an eagle cresting the department of justice insignia of the special operations division indicated the origin of the badge. Confirming Carlton’s guess were the embossed letters F.B.I. all in caps. Opening the agent’s lapel, Carlton could see he was packing a gun. He set the lapel back in place. What was an FBI agent doing behind a fence near the School Book Depository? Carlton wasn’t sure what to do next.

He turned his attention to the wooden fence before him. A small tree on the other side had released a few leaves that hung midair, motionless above the ground. He stepped up to the fence and a familiar sight unfolded before him. It was Dealey Plaza lit bright by the afternoon sun. He saw the backs of the crowd lining the causeway. He could see Abraham Zapruder standing on the white concrete pedestal by the memorial holding his PD Bell& Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera. It didn’t go unnoticed by Carlton that frame z007 was at this very second being shot.

Carlton saw the motorcycle cops leaning into the turn from Elm Street and the background noise was a bit louder. He saw the smiles and looks of anticipation on the people’s faces, and he saw the red brick corner of the School Book Depository. He looked behind him at the human statue, Agent Kyleford, and he shook his head in disbelief. “Oliver Stone was right. It was all a conspiracy. There was a second gunman, and that man was now sixty some years in the future and running for President.” Carlton was a scientist, he paused. He needed facts and proof before concluding. He headed for the School Book Depository Building and a rendezvous with an ex-marine and sociopath.

Carlton crossed the back fence and headed down the grassy knoll towards the building’s front entrance. He passed Zapruder on the pedestal and his secretary who was helping him steady his legs as he shot the infamous film. He proceeded up the sidewalk lined with onlookers focused on the street corner. A hungering curiosity caused Carlton to increase his speed. He arrived at the front steps of the building where he froze in place, foot on stair and just as immoveable as the rest of this world he inhabited.

He drew in a breath of surprise. At the top of the stair, he could swear he was staring right into the face of Lee Harvey Oswald. He glanced back at the motorcade still frozen in place. Down Elm Street he could see Jackie’s pink pill box hat, outfit and black hair. Kennedy was obscured behind a motorcycle cop.

Carlton began to reason. If that’s Oswald, there’s no way he could have made it to the sixth floor to fire those shots. For the second time that day Carlton felt a loss of equilibrium.

He replanted his foot on the ground and took another look. Carlton recalled something about eyewitness confusion that had come up during the Warren Report. He noticed the man had the name “Billy” in script sewn onto his work jacket by his left pectoral. Carlton would later learn the man was an employee of the School Book Depository. His name was Billy Nolan Lovelady, a twenty-six-year-old stockman. From a distance the man could have been Oswald’s doppelganger. Carlton climbed the steps and slid past the group of employees sitting and standing on the stairs awaiting the President’s motorcade. He entered the dark entrance of the Depository.

The small lobby was empty save for a cigarette machine and radiator rising from the linoleum floor. Despite the stark white foyer, there was a musty smell that filled his nostrils, like wet paper that had dried out in a tobacco barn. It permeated the whole warehouse. He saw a sign that listed the publishing companies renting space in the building. A set of stairs against a tiled glass wall curved upwards braced by a wood-white railing. Carlton began to make the climb.

The second-floor Southwest corner of the building was a secretarial pool. Visible was a half dozen empty desks with signs of work being suddenly halted and recently abandoned. Paper jammed in the Selectric and Underwood typewriters, file drawers partially opened. Coffee cups left on desks with wisps of steam on hold above them. He saw a sign that read, STAIRS in all caps and a jagged stair shaped line pointing the way. He continued on.

The third floor he could see an empty lunchroom with tables, chairs, and candy and soda machines. Half-eaten lunches and near empty bottles of coke were on the tables. The candy machine had the antiquated clear plastic pull levers. In the machine were Dots, Good and Plenty, Tootsie Roll, NECCO Wafers, Chuckles and even Candy Cigarettes. All but the later he remembered from childhood.

The machine also had a mirror and Carlton couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was his own reflection of course, he knew that. It was what his image was doing that rattled him to his core. It would go from his normal reflection, then changing to what can only be described as glitch, into a film negative version of himself. A white man with dark eyes in a dark trebly hat flashed into a dark man with white eyes and a bright white trebly hat. A negative man, so to speak.

He tried to calm himself to figure out what was happening. It dawned on him after a fifth glitch “The Zapruder Film! It’s got to be.” Carlton understood the shelf life, unless adequately preserved, of good acetate film was 70 years at a maximum. The Zapruder film was 60 years old and may have already begun a process of decay. It’s possible he was beginning to fade from this plane of existence and return to the collider or disappear altogether. He looked at his watch. The second hand was sweeping around the face. This was not the ’63 Omega watch. It was a Movado watch from the twenty-first century. Mr. X must’ve started to prepare early and switched them. Whatever the reason, it was acting like a small magnet causing this time distortion. Carlton had no idea when he might be pulled back to his timeline. He had to get to the sixth floor. He had to know, did Oswald act alone?

Carlton arrived at the six floor. Here the musky smell was more pronounced. Dust particles glinted in the sunlight pouring through the far end windows. Stacks upon stacks of books rose to the thick wooden cross beams dividing the large space into thirds. He stifled a sneeze and walked towards the Southeast windows heading for the corner. The glitch effect was happening at seven second intervals as he got closer to a stack of books piled high on an angle blocking the whole corner window from view. The background noise began to return which indicated an open window. Carlton stepped around the boxes to find himself standing diagonally to a crouched Lee Harvey Oswald.

The first thing that struck Carlton was how puny the man was. Bent on one knee, Oswald held the Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with scope to his side at a 60° angle with both hands. There were a set of boxes stacked two to three feet high in front of him creating the sniper’s nest. He was wearing a long sleeved, brownish, pattern woven shirt with a small hole in the right sleeve. Beneath it, a white crew neck tee shirt and dark khaki or chino pants, all that and his wiry frame balanced on pair of black Oxford work shoes.

By leaning a little to his right Carlton could only make out a profile view of Oswald’s face, but he could see a hawkish stare beneath a pinched eyebrow. Though almost chinless and an early receding hairline, Oswald reminded Carlton of a bird of prey’s hatchling, his tongue tucked between his lips as if he were just about to line up his shot.

Carlton could see the Kennedy motorcade heading directly for the building. The President’s limousine frozen about fifty yards back. He wondered why didn’t Oswald shoot with this viewpoint. It seemed to be a much easier shot. Then he noticed an object to his right near a column of stacked books. It was a brown three-foot piece of wrapping paper, long enough to contain curtain rods or a rifle, depending on if you were a DIY enthusiast or a warped little nobody who longed to be somebody, anybody… big. The paper wrapper was in mid fall as if it had just dropped off the nearby book stack. Carlton deduced that Oswald had just gotten into place only seconds before, indicating he was rushed and a possible explanation for the first shot missing.

Carlton had an idea. All he had to do was adjust the elevation knob on the scope and turn the power ring by the eyepiece setting it out of focus. This could disrupt Oswald more than enough to miss the shot. He could also just smack him over the head with a thick Scholastic Math book from one of the boxes.

The whole changing history conundrum was interrupted. The negative glitching increased, and Carlton began to flicker like a broken florescent light bulb. He felt the nausea returning, the vertigo, tinnitus and seering pain return. Oswald stayed unmolested in 1963. Carlton left 1963 in an eyeblink.

Inside the laboratory basement Mr. X and the launch crew were scrambling about, attempting to stop the collider. Carlton zapped into existence surrounded by the dancing blue electrical charge. To everyone else, Carlton had never left. They lost visual contact only for a lightning flash moment. The machine wound down, the power levels stabilized, and the spinning Hadron Collider slowed to a stop. Carlton fell to his knees dry heaving for there was nothing left to come up except for internal organs.

The medical staff entered with a gurney and lifted Carlton from the device and wheeled him to the decontamination room. No one knew that Carlton had travelled through time. They only saw a man scream in pain and drop to his knees to wretch. They had no idea they were looking at the first Nanonaut in history, and from history.

Mr. X was livid. Cheeks flushed and ears red as he pushed passed the medical team. “What the fuck was that, Evers?”

“I couldn’t in good conscience experiment with another human being’s life. It’s my theory, it’s my invention, the risks should be mine. For all I know you could have materialized in the Earth’s core or on the moon.” Carlton glanced over at the briefcase on the other side of the room. Mr. X caught the eyeline. He crossed over to the attaché and lifted the foam. His pistol, and silencer were in the holster and stock were just where he left them. Before travelling through time, Carlton changed his mind at the last second and never took the protection along with him. He was a scientist for Christ’s sake, not James Bond.

Then X opened the center sleeve in the attaché, empty. He followed with the front. He removed the manila envelope. He peeked at its contents. Satisfied he tossed it into the briefcase, locking it. He turned slowly to Carlton. “Reset the launch, we’re going to try this again. Get undressed.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” Carlton said. “The experiment didn’t work because of the brittle state of the Zapruder film itself.” He scootched up in the bed and continued, “New film can be very fragile let alone sixty-year-old acetate. The scanning process created a molecular decay chain reaction. It would’ve been safer if we started with something relatively recent. You didn’t perhaps film your wedding day, did you?”

Mr. X was in no mood. He took up his attaché and signaled for his men to follow him. He held up the omega watch and signaled to Carlton’s wrist. They traded watches. X spoke without eye contact as he put on his watch. “Professor Evers, seeing as Uncle Sam footed the bill for your device, the government will be taking possession of L.O.R.I. immediately. Your services are no longer required. We’ll be bringing in a new team.” With that, the men in black turned and left. Professor Carlton Evers wasn’t about to let that happen.

President John Kyleford was elected that November. His first action had all files on the JFK assassination released through the Freedom of Information Act. The new President specifically requested the release of an FBI file that, up until this day, contained information the CIA considered too sensitive and a threat to National Security.

It was a two-page report his younger self wrote as a twenty-four-year-old FBI agent stationed in Dallas on another November day sixty plus years ago. It described his attempts to get to Oswald on the day of the shooting. He discovered a copy of the Presidents route in an envelope addressed to Alek Hidell’s post office box. Alek Hidell was Oswald’s alias. The same name he purchased the gun under. There was no return address.

Kyleford attained the letter with a warrant based on Oswald’s possible participation in the Bay of Pigs and “Operation Mongoose.” That day Special Agent Jack Kyleford was on his way to detain Oswald. Before he could, he was intercepted by two CIA agents who were not conspiring to kill the President but bent on covering up any entanglements related to “Operation Mongoose.”

The President’s second executive order was to begin a complete overhaul of the Central Intelligence Agency by rooting out the agency within the agency. The divisions that created clandestine operations without oversight like Mongoose. He also added a firewall to the NSA. Checks and balances was the order of the day.

“Operation Lancer” was exposed within the Department of Homeland Security but remained classified within the very top echelons of the government. It was revealed to be an attempted hit on the younger Kyleford to get him from writing the report that implicated the CIA in the first place. The agency knew Kyleford had written one but had no idea where it was these past decades. It was a ticking time bomb as far as they were concerned, and the best solution was if it was never reported. They were willing to sacrifice John Kyleford’s contribution to history to diffuse that bomb. The entire plan, like the conspiracy, was a coverup.

It would never be known who sent Alek Hidell the map, despite the Mexican postage, but it was certain he never received it. Lee Harvey Oswald at least on that day, acted alone. Was he influenced by outside entities? Quite possibly.

What was a certainty is none of this would have come to light had not Professor Carlton Evers upon his return from the past contacted then Presidential candidate John Kyleford and blew the whistle on “Operation Lancer.” At first Kyleford was dismissive of the Professor, but Carlton knew he could convince him when he personally handed the President-to-be the FBI Special Agent badge Kyleford wore many, many years ago. Carlton had pilfered it as evidence, bringing it back with him from 1963, the year Kyleford mysteriously lost it.

Today is Tuesday. Professor Carlton Evers is staring again at Polaroid of Lori Sanders on the beach towel. He knows there isn’t enough data in that picture to risk another trip back in time. He also learned he had developed acute Leukemia from his first time-travelling excursion. The radiation exposure was never considered in the calculations. Its rapid progression meant he had months maybe weeks before he succumbed to the cancer. Carlton turned the photo over.

On the back of every Polaroid from that era there’s a ten-digit number representing the month of production, year of production, machine used, film type and day the film was produced. There’s a whole market on eBay for old Polaroid stock. Carlton ordered a box of the 600 film with that exact production number and found it. For a little less than 35 bucks he now possessed the same negative composite material needed. Added to Lori’s photo, it might provide enough data for the Haldon collider to send him back to Ocean City and 1983 and that beautiful beach day. If not, he had nothing to lose. Cancer and or Mr. X were waiting in the shadows.

This would be a one-way trip. But first a quick hack. By inputting a time code virus that could wipe clean all the data and software that controlled the Time Machine, Evers made sure no one could ever follow. There were too many unpredictable outcomes for his liking. It was better no one else have the power.

Carlton stepped into the chamber wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, tank top under a blue Hawaiian shirt, knee socks, sandals and sunglasses from ’83. He wondered if he could be seen would his younger self and Lori figure out where he was from. He was going back not to engage but to observe one of the happiest days of his life. He would see himself as he wished to be remembered and Lori would be eternally young and not have died in a car accident the year following their meeting. He set the new composite photo of Lori Saunders into the slot revealing the faded inscription under the laser light. “2 Evers, 4 Ever. Love, Lori.”

Tentacles of blue lightning arced throughout the chamber followed by a blinding flash of blue light. Professor Carlton Evers was gone. History.