Time Travel

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(This story was written in response to a challenge to tell a story in less than 500 words)

He climbed the steps to Becky's apartment. He had done so many times. But today he stood there for a long moment, the screen door propped open with an elbow. The elbow was attached to an arm that led to a hand. The hand nervously fingered a small box nestled deep in the pocket of his faded jeans.

The apartment was an afterthought, sliced from the back of a once stately home. The home was now chopped beyond recognition. Becky and all her stuff lived in what was once the kitchen and informal dining area. A thriving real estate office occupied the more formal front. Upstairs, a tasteful apartment. The home of Steve and Cory.

They met, by chance, as freshmen. Sitting together in a large crowded room, suffering through a badly cooked lunch, they discovered a mutual hatred of Bruce Springsteen. Six years later they spent their days teaching classes for professors who were paid for teaching classes that were taught by graduate students. They spent their nights in a large bedroom above an empty real estate office.

In this bedroom a child had once been conceived… a child who grew to a man. The man became a soldier who rode a boat to North Africa and was killed by a German soldier who later died of colon cancer in a hospital in Stuttgart. They did not know of that boy or that man or his sister who died of influenza in the room they called their "study."

They did not know of these lives, nor could that soldier have ever imagined that two men would one day sleep in his parent’s room. His sister could not foresee that today a young woman would receive an engagement ring, a young man staring hopefully at her hand and her face in a mirror that hung on the wall above the washbasin that was no longer there.

The little girl, who three months later died of the flu, chipped her front tooth on that washbasin while wrestling her doll away from her stubborn little brother… the boy who rode in a ship to North Africa. Her mother did not sleep that night, worried that no man would marry a girl with chipped teeth

When the telegram arrived, her husband sat quietly in a chair his grandfather had made and stared at a photo of his boy. He would later lay that faded photo on the seat next to him and shut his eyes as the car filled with fumes in the closed garage near the steps where the young man stood, holding open the screen door with his elbow.

Years later and years before, the little girl’s mother stood quietly, tracing a line of chipped enamel along the edge of that wash basin, stroking it absentmindedly with her index finger. She stared at a spot in the air… longing for death. It was slow in coming.

Outside, his index finger brushed over the velvet case for the last time. He drew a deep breath and opened the door. His future was only moments away.

written by Jay Warmke - March, 2004

Time Travel