Day 13 - 36 Seconds Story

36 Seconds Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 

Albert was able to travel thirty-six seconds back into the past.  It was not the best time traveling skill ever conceived.  Albert hadn’t asked for this skill or ability or temporal displacement technique or whatever you wanted to call it.  One day Albert couldn’t travel in time, and then the next day he could.  There was no science experiment gone wrong, no deus ex machina, no genie in a bottle.  Albert couldn’t explain it, but he could do it.  It was as simple as wishing it to happen and then it happened.

Time traveling has its perks.  Relive great moments.  Fix mistakes.  Get a second chance.  Time traveling thirty-six seconds leaves you with fewer options to work with, but the general concepts remained the same.  The real kicker was that time continued moving forward while you were gone.  Your mind was in the past redoing whatever it was you wanted to redo, but your body was in the present, just sitting there, awaiting further instructions.

This time traveling quirk presented a set of significant and serious drawbacks. 

Relive thirty-six seconds in the past, you miss out on thirty-seconds of your present.  Stay in those same thirty-six seconds a few times and the minutes add up quick on the other side. You could relive a great moment over and over and over.  You could redo something as many times as it took to get things right.  But somewhere, out there in your own future, you were just getting older.

Skipping time when leaping back to the future was the worst.  If you were just gone for thirty-six seconds, you didn’t really miss much.  It was sort of like a long blink or a really short catnap.  People didn’t notice you weren’t really there.  They thought you zoned out or fell asleep or weren’t listening to them.  But really, you didn’t miss much.  Stop paying attention to a song or to a lecture or to a television show and you can usually pick right back.  Conversations were harder.  Sometimes people had pertinent information that they shared.  Sometimes they were asking you a question and wondered why you had forgotten what they had just said.  Girlfriends hated that the most.  It made Albert seem like the cliché inconsiderate inattentive boyfriend, when really he had just been off somewhere trying to make something ever so slightly better.

When he was younger, he found this skill to be particularly useful.  He could ask a girl out, and then spare himself the embarrassment if need be, or give himself a second crack at a pick up line.  He used this often at parties.  If people were drunk they seldom noticed his bouts of blanking out.  You could always blame the alcohol.  He had performed great moments of sex over and over.  He had improved his answers in school.  He avoided tripping in public.  He unbroke what his clumsiness had destroyed.  Once, he had even saved a boy on a bike from getting hit in traffic.

Then the car crashed.

Albert was thirty three, and he had been in love with Annabelle since they met in college.  The night they had been struck by the pickup truck was an ordinary night.  There was no rain to hinder someone’s vision.  There was no streetlight out or broken traffic signal.  No one had been drinking and they weren’t under any other impairment.  It was not a night that made you think there would be a traffic accident.

But there had been.  And Annabelle was gone.  She had her seatbelt, but the car had rolled and rolled and rolled and there had been so much damage done.

Albert’s first instinct was to travel back, to see her healthy for the few seconds before the accident began again.  He didn’t have to relive the total thirty-six seconds.  He didn’t have to take part in the crash again and see the worst of it.  He would just relive the first few seconds in order to see her smiling face and her loving eyes one more time.  And then he would leap back.

But he got scared.  It wasn’t easy to watch as the light of your love was extinguished when instead you could see it glow.  He got scared.

Albert didn’t know how many times he had relived those frightening final seconds.  He was afraid to stop doing it and find out.  Maybe it had been years and he was in a coma in a hospital somewhere.  Maybe only thirty-six seconds had passed by and he would wake up on the side of the road and it would be no more than a simple blackout.  Maybe it had been any amount of time in between.

Maybe he was dead on the other side of time.  He had no way of knowing that or figuring it out.  Maybe his mind was living in this time-loop but his bloody body was gone.  If that were the case, how could he ever find out?

Regardless, he was fairly satisfied with his decision to stay.  He was scared and he didn’t want to lose her.  What sort of life would he have in the future present without her?

So he time traveled and he relived the time-loop.  He was scared, so he stayed.

Thirty-six seconds didn’t always present very many opportune moments, but sometimes they offered the perfect ones.