Mulberries on the Edge of Forever

(Click here for Chapter 1)
September, 1977

It's been a month since I created The Thing, and it doesn't seem inclined to go away. At least not yet.

I come home after school and The Thing is still there. I check after dinner and it greets me with a wink. The next day it's there. And the next. And the next.

I look through The Thing, and Grandma Kroll's house changes on a whim. Sometimes white, sometimes blue. Once it was greenish. But when I look over, under, or around The Thing, it remains resolutely white.

I've taken to calling the thing, "The Thing."

I look through The Thing from different angles. At the bushes. At the garage. At the shed. Sometimes the bushes are blooming, sometimes they're bare, sometimes covered with fruit, sometimes just leafy. One time the garage was gone. Once a different garage was there and the shed was gone. I never see people, though. Or anything alive other than plants.

So far, I've been unable to unlock The Thing's …

(Click here for Chapter 1)
December, 1986

The elevator doors open, and I push my cart out into the hallway. Room 425.  I take a right. The room service trays, with their stainless steel covers, clatter as I walk. The hall seems to stretch itself in front of me as I move over the brightly-colored carpet. I can feel my heart beating. In my temples. In my chest. In my wrists.

This is not going to go well.

My Walkman is clipped to my belt. Don Henley blasts in my ears. Johnny Can't Read. Long Way Home. Dirty Laundry. One of my favorite parts of the job is when I get to vacuum a meeting room. The vacuum drowns out my voice as I sing along. At least I hope it drowns out my voice.

I take a drink of my coffee as I continue down the hall. I have no idea if this is good coffee or bad coffee. I hate coffee. So it doesn't really matter. But the coffee is free. And I work pretty late.

I see room 425 just ahead, and I stop the cart to slow my heartbeat. I almost turn it around. Get someone e…

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1973(?)
I'm 8 years old. Maybe 9. I don't know.

It's night time, and I'm sitting on a step in the middle of the stairway that leads to the bedrooms upstairs. The carpet is rainbow-colored shag, and it's worn at the edges of the steps and smashed down in the middle. I'm listening to the television from the front room. I don't want to go to bed.

I'm scared.

I was in bed. I asked to stay up, but grandma is babysitting, and grandma follows the rules. "Don't worry," my sisters say. "If an axe murderer breaks in, he'll have to kill all of us down here before he could get to you." I don't know why that's a calming thought.

"Oaf!" says grandma. She's Danish.

I go upstairs, and I'm in bed, and I'm fine, when I feel a sort of rumbling. It's my bed. Like when a train rolls through town and the whole house shakes. But I listen and there are no whistles from the train or bells fr…

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May, 1977
The first time I see her, it's for only a second, in the distance, and I'm not sure exactly what I've seen.

I'm delivering newspapers, walking by myself past an explosion of bright poppies by the small empty lot across from our house, and the sight of her stops me in mid-conversation.

For a moment it's like I'm seeing her from every angle at once without really seeing her at all. She's not facing me. But then she is. I turn to see if she's behind me too, because it seems like she should be, but she's not. When I turn back, she's gone.

I blink a few times, focusing on the place where she probably wasn't. Sweat stings my eyes and my vision doubles. It happened so fast I'm not sure it happened at all.

Blink.

Once I'm fairly certain it probably wasn't whatever it seemed to be, I reach for a paper from the large cloth bag dangling by my knees and walk it over to the porch of a small, yellow house, k…

August, 1977
I sit in the rusted folding chair in one corner of the clubhouse. I'm staring intently at ground in front of me. I'm waiting for something to happen. I don't really think it will.

This is experiment x00213.

It says so on the open page of the notebook at my feet.

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Two things you should know about the clubhouse.
It's not a house.It was never intended to contain a club. Clubs mean people. People get in the way.

I could call it a hideout, I suppose, but that implies an intent that I'm not prepared to concede. I'm not anti-social. I just don't want people in the clubhouse. The clubhouse is for reading. The clubhouse is for contemplation. The clubhouse is for experimentation.

These things are done alone.

I stare a bit longer at the seemingly random framework of sticks, paperclips, and rubber bands that I've built in the center of the clubhouse. It unfolds tentatively from the crusty dirt floor beneath my feet like some sort of shyly primitive a…