The Wrath of Time

I had a particularly stressful day, what with my pet porcupine Filster deciding to leave me and live with the next door neighbors, the Kelvash’s; and then there was the arrival of the letter I sent myself when I was five to my fifty-seven year old self through the post office’s, “Why Don’t You Write Your Future Self a Letter Campaign?,” in which I read that I hope I hadn’t gone bald.

I needed to get away for immediate peace of mind, and I got in my time travel machine and punched in the coordinates for my boyhood home, Christmas morning, 1967, Blowster, Connecticut. That was an especially good Christmas when I got the NASA approved G.I. Joe that came with an official space capsule and authentic space suit; a Queasy-Bake Cookerator (basically the Easy-Bake oven but for boys – rather than cookies, it took the same ingredients and made a turd); and a Pudding Head (this was a device that made a mold of your head, you added pudding, and when it was done, you ate your head.)

The thing is, I never made it to Christmas 1967. The time machine malfunctioned and I got stuck in-between Time. Sure, that sounds interesting, but time travel is an abomination to Time. Time doesn’t like to admit that it’s got holes. It wants us to believe it only moves forward, one moment to the next. And so Time goes berserk every time someone like me goes zipping around back and forth in it. When you get stuck in-between, Time kicks your ass by squeezing you like a candy bar in the back pocket of a sitting elephant.

There I was being squished out of existence, and in my despair, I got to thinking, “Why did I think I could avoid pain? Pain is part of life like the end pieces of bread. Trying to get out of pain actually produces more pain because pain hates to be ignored, just like me.”

Suddenly I slipped out of Time’s wrath (it turns out tears are a great Time lubricant) and ended up in 1337, Tournai, Belgium, in the midst of the Black Plague. Bodies were being piled into carts, people were coughing and wailing, the smell of death was in the air. I took a deep breath, let it out, excited to finally explore Belgium!