As YellowBrian’s—his—brother stepped away from the microphone, the mourners lined up to pay their last respects. Brian looked down into the casket as he passed, looked at his own face lying silently on velvet, and he wasn’t sure who was dead and who was alive. Soon the undertaker lowered the body into the grave, and began piling dirt on top of it. Each thud of wet earth resonated in Brian’s chest like a shotgun blast, and he wanted to run to the grave, crying that he’d dropped his keys inside, anything that would make them stop. As long as he was above ground, Brian could tell everyone what had happened, swap the wristbands back, and crawl into the casket where he belonged. But Pat tugged at his hand and led him away to the car. She drove them to the luncheon, where they served three different kinds of casserole.

A week later, Brian stared at the invoices on his computer screen. He wished he could ask one of his doubles what to do. Even though he had the same job as all the others, their account numbers and names were different. But he couldn’t concentrate on it anyway. All he could think about was the barely audible sound of muffled tears from Janice’s desk two cubicles down. He remembered wishing before that they lived in the same universe, and he didn’t have to pay for a Slide every time he wanted to see her. Now she was working just a few feet away, and he didn’t know what to say, or if he wanted to say anything.

After a few more hours of staring blankly at paperwork he didn’t recognize, Brian counted the seconds on the clock until it reached closing time, then shut down his computer, grabbed his jacket, walked down the hall and into the parking garage. As he trudged through the dimly-lit concrete path, he passed Janice’s car, where she leaned listlessly against the door, her forehead pressed against the window with lethargic apathy.

“How are you doing?” Brian asked. It was the first thing he’d said to her all day.

“Bad,” she said with a harsh sniffle. “I just don’t know where to go from here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought we were meant for each other. His was the only Pat that died in that car wreck as a girl, but I was the only Janice that survived mine. It had symmetry, you know?”

“And now... he died in a car wreck,” Brian said flatly.

“I guess that’s symmetrical too,” Janice growled.

“Is there anything I can do?” Brian stepped forward and leaned against the car next to her.

“I think I just need space. I can’t look at your face without thinking it’s him, even just for a second, and... and I don’t think I can handle that.”

“If it makes you feel better, I think he wanted to propose.” It was true. He thought that he had wanted to propose. “He just didn’t know how to do it.”

“It doesn’t count for much now, does it?”

“No, I suppose not.”

They stood silently and the roar of car engines echoing in the parking garage died down as everyone else started their commute. Brian gave her a pained smile, then began to slink away when she grabbed his arm.

“Wait.” She looked up anxiously into his face. “I never really got to say goodbye. Can I...?” She stood up on her toes and kissed Brian briefly, her lips tinged with the salt of tears and sweetness of chapstick. “I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have-”

Brian clutched the back of her head and pulled her into him. He kissed her, sucking at her lips like they were his last chance of survival. At first she resisted, but her hands soon wrapped around his back and she sighed with painful relief. With blindly groping hands, she opened the back door of her car, and they fell into the seat. Something in the back of Brian’s mind pointed out that where she had been his consolation prize before, now he was hers. But that thought was pushed away as her clothes slipped off, hastily revealing her familiar warmth.

That night, a buckle jangled as Brian dropped his bag to the ground by the front door. A plate of spaghetti sat at the table, the clumps of Parmesan cheese stained orange from the sauce. Pat drifted in from the kitchen, her makeup already wiped off.

“Hey, sweetie,” she said weakly, kissing him on the cheek. Her lips burned, and Brian worried that she would taste Janice on him. “I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you, but I didn’t know when you’d be home.”

“I just... needed to take a detour. Clear my head.”

“I know.” She wrapped her arms around him, and buried her face against his neck. “I know this has been hard on you. I wish there was something I could do to make you feel better.”

Brian lifted his hand, looking at the reflection of the light on his wedding ring. She was his wife now, and this was the most they had touched since the hospital. Everything he had ever wanted was in his arms right now, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Janice.

“I just need time,” he said, pulling away from Pat’s embrace. “I’m going to the study to think, maybe watch TV. I’ll join you for bed later.”

The battered old recliner in the study was unfamiliar, and springs poked him in unexpected places when he sat. He could still feel Janice all over him, their mingled sweat tainting his clothes. Had he cheated on Pat? He wore the ring, but he wasn’t the one that made that promise to her. Brian took the ring off and turned it absentmindedly in his fingers. He thought he could see flecks of dried blood still stuck on the inside, but his gut told him those should have worn off already. He wanted to call up one of his doubles and ask his advice, but he knew that wouldn’t help. They had no experience here; whatever he did, he was on his own.

Brian grabbed a coat from the closet, reading the label on the inside of the collar before putting it on. Cecil Lawrence. Lawrence was a good name. Maybe he could become a Lawrence. Not Larry. Lawrence.

He crept into the kitchen, scrawled a note, and left it on the table. His—no, not his, YellowBrian’s—wedding ring plunked down on top of it. Stepping out into the night, he closed the front door as quietly as he could. The sky was clear and full of moonlight as he drove to the Slide Station, and it was still clear on the Red side. When he reached the cemetery, Brian didn’t need his flashlight to find his way to the fresh grave, green shoots just peaking up out of the damp brown soil.

With slow and steady strokes, Brian dug a small hole on top of the grave with his bare hands, dropping the dirt carefully to the side with each handful. Then he placed the yellow wristband inside, and filled it back in. It didn’t occur to him until he was back in the car that they wouldn’t let him back through the Slide Station without a wristband. But at least he was in his own universe now, and if he never saw one of his doubles again, Lawrence could figure things out.

………………………………………………

Joseph L. Kellogg works as an environmental chemist by day, and writes speculative fiction by night. He lives in Northeast Tennessee with his wife and absolutely, positively, no cats.

TimeMachineStory

Richmond A Clements

I admit it, building the time machine was a mistake. I know that now.

But… at the time. At the time, it had seemed like such a good idea. And when I had that idea, sitting there in the plane, looking out of the window, I couldn’t wait to build it.

It had just come to me. I looked down at the city streets, criss crossing like the lines on a circuit board. The cars and people were pulses of information, moving from point to point on the board; it was all so clear. So I built the circuit board I had seen in the street plan, and constructed a time machine around it.

And it worked.

So now you’ve built a time machine – an honest to goodness working time machine – you’ve got some pretty major questions that you’ve got to ask yourself. Like where, or rather, when, would you go?

First moon landing? What about the first man on Mars? Woodstock? Gettysburg? Nuremberg?

No. If you are anything at all like me, you’ll just stick to the classics. The birth of Christ, dinosaurs, the Rumble in the Jungle.

What can I tell you about these things?

I stepped into the time machine and back sixty million years. It was like stepping out of your car in the middle of a safari park.You know that bit in Jurassic Park? The bit where that Australian guy – can’t remember his name – the guy in that hat, he looks down at a lake and all the different dinosaurs are drinking there? It was like that, only I was in the middle of it. There were so many of them. Thousands of animals the size of houses were lumbering around me. And the noise, the smell – it was like the stench of the elephant house in a zoo, only multiplied a thousand times. But the air was clean. Free from any hint of man’s interference. So clean that you could smell it beneath the animal musk.