Eddy

There was a flash. The basement was full of sparks; like a rave, but with fewer drugs and slightly more chance of someone calling the cops.

"Once I've perfected the machine," Grigor said, "I'll go back and save her. I'll change history!"

"But then you'd have no impetus to ever create the machine," I pointed out, "so you would never have been able to save her... so she'll die, and you'll invent the machine..." I paused to think. He pushed a button and something whirred to crackling life. "Do you ever get déjà vu?" I asked.

There was a flash...

The End Will Be the Beginning

"Hello," said the small, hirsute man who had appeared unexpectedly on the television screen. "I'm broadcasting this to apologize to as many people as possible. I swear I intended only to benefit humanity, to free us from the constraints of time and space." He sighed, and something behind him flared into eerie blue radiance. He hunched over, his brow thickening, dark hair sprouting on his face. "Now it's too late," he said, as the street sounds, the roar of engines and electricity, began to fade, "or maybe too early."

The television crumbled away.

Outside, the jungle was starting to grow.

New Old Kicks

"What are we even doing here?" I asked as we passed some scraggly wino. "You don't even smoke dope."

"We gotta come here. I can feel it," Eric said. He pointed. "There."

A tall, dark-haired man I'd never seen before nodded as if he recognized us. He held up a small glass tube, and suddenly I wanted that vial more than anything in the world. The man smiled as we stumbled toward him.

"It never fails," he said.

"What?" I panted. "What is it?"

"Quantum foam. Freebased. It burns backwards." He rattled the drug in his hands. "You're already addicted."

Document in Safe Deposit Box 0005

MOTHER –

AM SENDING MESSAGE UPON ARRIVAL AT DESTINATION AS REQUESTED STOP

UNFORTUNATELY MUST REPORT DID NOT ARRIVE SAFELY CAUSE UNCERTAIN BUT EXTREMELY FATAL STOP

AM FORWARDING MESSAGE FROM AFTERLIFE BUT ENCOUNTERING TEMPORAL COMPLICATIONS NO CELLPHONES NO COMPUTERS ONLY TELEGRAM OPERATORS AT OWN POINT OF ARRIVAL STOP

ACCOMPANYING MESSAGE TO ANCESTORS LAYS OUT DETAILS FOR ENSURING TIMELY DELIVERY GRAMMA'S HEIRLOOM SAFE DEPOSIT KEY NOW LESS MYSTERIOUS STOP

DO NOT WORRY LOVE MIKE STOP

P.S. PLEASE LOOK AFTER CATS WHO HAVE ARRIVED PRIOR TO ME SEE PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED TEMPORAL COMPLICATIONS CATS REPORT YOU WILL PROVIDE ADEQUATE FOOD BUT INSUFFICIENT EAR SCRITCHES STOP

The Old Switcheroo

I glanced at the clock yet again. 3:20? It had been 3:21 a moment ago...

"That's it," I said. "Who's messing around?" I stuck my hand through spacetime and rooted around. Nobody in the fifth or the sixth, but in the seventh, I felt the triple-refolded topology of the scruff of someone's neck. I yanked on it.

Gordie grinned sheepishly at me. "We were moving hours from the back up to the front again. Janie bet me it'd take you a day to notice."

"Well, you can tell her she lost."

"Yeah. It's been, like, a week."

Conversation with a Time Traveler

"So... you're from the future?"

"I'm from a future. Obviously, I can't be from your future, because by coming here I've altered your timeline and thus my own. Paradoxes and multiple universes and so on. I think string theory has something to do with it."

"And... that's why you have that thing on your head?"

"Oh, this? No, we evolved a symbiotic relationship about a thousand years ago in my universe."

"With squid?"

"Have you ever felt rain through a squid's senses? Your kind don't even have words for what we can perceive together. And now you never will."

"...Pity."

Bump in the Road

Special Bonus Edition! 200-word story today because this one ended up at like 175 when I finished the first draft and I was like, "I could maim this into incomprehensibility or I could just run with it." Should I have bitten the bullet and chopped it up? Just scrapped it and tried to find a new idea? (I spent like thirty minutes planning this out on my walk home, though.) Ah, well. Call it making up time for the GenCon Void.

Welcome back, everyone, by the bye; it's nice to see you all again.

---

Clancy thought he saw something dart out into the road up ahead. He eased his foot off the gas, peering out through the windshield.

"I thought I should apologize," said a voice beside him. He nearly had a heart attack. A slender, shadow-eyed youth was suddenly in the passenger seat. "I thought I needed to live, back then. Back now, I guess. I didn't know. When you smeared me across eleven dimensions, I got really angry. I didn't understand; it's not like you suddenly 'get' everything the moment you die, you know?" The boy sighed. "I know now what I would do. Or am doing. What I had to do. Do you understand?"

Clancy shook his head.

"That's okay," said the boy. "For what it's worth, I feel really bad about what I will have already done to you. Hold on tight; there's a bump coming." He reached one foot over and stomped on the gas. The semi's engine roared in response.

Clancy caught a momentary glimpse of startled, frightened eyes in the headlights before something thudded underneath the truck. He'd just realized why the eyes looked familiar when something dark flared in the rearview.

The passenger seat was empty.

Revisited

Randolph stared at his hands, playing with a truck.  But he'd just been in the hospital, surely!  He could almost feel the tubes in his nose.

"Hey, loser!"

He recognized that voice.  Big Grady, the school bully.  Randolph recognized all of this, in fact.  Grady had beaten him up, badly, and ruined the rest of his school year.  I've gone back in time, Randolph thought.  Well, let's see how Grady likes thirty years of military training!

Randolph tried to stand, but the young body wouldn't respond.  He only sat, frozen, just as in his memory. 

A shadow fell over him.