Author’s Note: My apologies for the lack of communication over the last week. March in Korea is the start of new classes and the week has been incredibly busy with new arrangements, new classes. 11 more weeks of this, and I will be finished with this part of life. Also, if you’re on Facebook, don’t forget to like my author’s page. I would love to be able to communicate and give some of the “behind the scenes” regarding some of my stories.
They were called the “Four Arms”. Brothers-in-arms who did everything together.
Even illicit drugs.
Propped up by a fence, they found the secret stash of ‘shrooms buried among harmless normal mushrooms. They sat back and looked at the sky as they took in the fumes and took out from their own minds.
“Whoa! Look at that cloud up there! It looks…like Cookie Monster!”
I wanted to see history, and I got more than I bargained for.
One of the biggest problems with schools in this day in age is that you can’t actually see history happen. That’s what happens when you’re being educated on a space station somewhere between Jupiter and Uranus. You can see some things happen, but they’re so miniscule that if you blink, you miss it.
It’s 2115, and I’m sitting in another boring history class. We talk about the 21st century and the 20th century, with theories about how and why everything went wrong. We hear about how our grandparents from Russia, the then United States of America, China, a united Korea, and India, all got together to start colonizing other planets. That was 2020. And in almost 95 years, we’ve been able to expand all the way out here. However, Earth went all wrong. It went sideways, and descended into madness just after people started moving to the Moon.
They never tell you when in history, the precise moment when everything went wrong for the world. They never tell you about the moment when something pinged, and the start of the fall occurred.
That’s why I decided to do something about it. Brilliant little me decided to create the first watch to warp the space-time continuum, to go back and observe periods of time. I don’t know what people are taught, but time isn’t as ball-shaped or timey wimey as people think.
It was October 9th, 2115 when I made the first jump. I programmed it into an important period of time in the 21st century. However, to quote an ancestral singer named Phil Collins, “something happened on the way to Heaven.” It took me farther than I cared to go, and it took me to a scene that I never wanted to see or go to.
I materialized at Park Pier 40, in New York City. It was a beautiful sight, a clear day that I can very much remember. I looked at my watch to see where I ended up.
8:45AM, Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.
I looked up at the sky, to the south, and I heard the great engines of what my teachers called an airplane. Before my eyes, within a minute, I saw the plane slam into a building.
I remember seeing this in news-snippets that they’d show us in class, but I really didn’t understand the impact until I could see it for myself. What I saw shocked me to the core, as seeing it in person is much more sense-based. I stood there for an hour, watching the second plane fly into the other tower, and both of them collapsing.
I suspected, however, that there was more to the story than a terrorist attack. That the reason for Earth’s complete breakdown of civilization was not held in the three buildings and 4 planes that were used to kill thousands of people and start a major factional divide between spheres of influence.
I was about to program my way back home, when I noticed a weird light on my watch. I looked, and before I could press anything, the whole entire landscape that I saw warped around me and twisted into a sort of vertigous mess of colors. I blacked out, as my mind just couldn’t process all the stuff going through it. I woke up sitting in a park, in a very green city, looking at people milling around. It wasn’t New York, I could tell you that much.
I walked around for a few minutes, to get my bearings and see if I could find a newspaper or something with a date on it. As luck would have it, I found what they called a newspaper kiosk at the corner of the park. I walked up and looked at the main newspaper. I apparently landed in Seattle, Washington, on November 25th, 1991. The paper, something once referred to as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, had for a sideline “Seattle’s Nirvana breaks top 10.”
I mused to myself that a musical band or event would like not be what ends up breaking the Earth 40 years in the future. Still, I looked at the people. Unlike 2001, the people in 1991 were a little jumpy but not really like the 2001 folks. They seemed to have a lot more hope in their eyes, though it seemed like there was a little fade. So, I spent the next 4 hours watching people and enjoying real Earth foods. Coffee was something I liked, but to actually have it brewed right there was a feat of awesomeness that I don’t think I could ever believe.
After the four hours were up, I was walking around when I heard a beep from my watch. I looked down and it was glowing red again. Uh-oh, I guess that coffee was going to come up after all. Again, a major vertigous spin occurred and I felt like a cat inside a washing machine. Until I landed, face first, onto a concrete sidewalk.
I looked up and I noticed that everything was clean. Really clean. The cars were very weird looking, they actually had a boxy definition and were very distinctive. I looked around, and recognized a landmark from where I was standing. I recognized the bright white of the Coit Tower in the distance, realizing that I was in San Francisco.
I looked around the area, and saw a newspaper that was rolled up in front of a storefront. It looked to be around 9AM or so, on a bright day, and so I decided to take a peek. The date landed me on April 17, 1946.
Wait. 1946?!?!
Nothing happened at ALL on this date. I scrambled around the area, looking for some indication that something big was going to happen. I passed a bookstore along the way down the street, but something inside told me to stop. It told me to stop and go back. I went back to take a look at the bookstore I had passed, as my gut was saying “You wanna know? Here ya go.” I looked all throughout the entire window display that was up and I saw a book, seemingly innocent and just sitting there. A small card underneath said “The latest for the home, to take care of the family.”
After I saw the title of the book, everything suddenly clicked. The start of the decline of Earth’s civilization didn’t start with a terrorist attack, or a musical interlude. It started with 4 words and 1 name:
It was called “Baby and Child Care”. The author was Dr. Benjamin Spock.
I looked at my watch, after it made a slightly different sound. This time, it glowed green. I knew that my adventure would come to an end, and the answers that I found were going to be unbelievable. However, I happen to think that I will finally be able to get an A on my history paper, and make some people question everything they know.
I just pray that I don’t get stuck somewhere on the way back.
A long while ago, I had told the story of an incident where my “future wife spirit” had come to visit me and inform me that I was to wait for her. Naturally, I was skeptical, and after it was all over, I wasn’t able to get any sleep the rest of that night.
The next day, for the record, I was incredibly useless at work and was raked over the coals by my boss for being a “paperweight around the ankles of this firm”. One day, I vow I will leave that company and never look back.
To say the least, it got worse. I had the prescience of mind to go and visit my pastor, who deemed me as being either incredibly insane, a newly initiated member of a cult, or a new apostle. In that order. He wasn’t much of a help on this, lemme tell ya.
Fast forward to three months later. By this time, I nearly forgot about what happened. I went through my daily life, doing what I do, and just being sad about my situation. I came home from work as the sun was at the most perfect position in the sky. I walked out to my patio, opened a bottle of IPA, and looked out over the neighborhood and at the sun. It was probably the first time since that night when I actually had peace in my heart.
I went back inside and sat down on my bed, as I was in a studio apartment. I felt a bit sad, because while I was at peace with most things, I was back to the old habit of mine about seeing my life ticking away. I even kicked myself a little bit because I was thinking about an old girlfriend who I likely could have been in a long-term relationship with, had I not been a greedy little buggard.
In the midst of this darkening of my mood, and as the sun went down over the horizon, a gust of wind came in from the window. I looked up and I saw the misty form from before, this time being a little bit more corporeal. She sat next to me on my bed and smiled.
This time, I was able to recognize that it was a feminine smile, and that she was much more defined as feminine, though I was unable to see the rest of the defining features of her.
“Seems like you were starting to forget about me.”
I looked at her and sighed heavily.
“Well, I figured that you were a one-time dream that was the result of eating a spicy pizza.”
She giggled at my statement, which in my eyes was kind of cute.
“When it comes to God and things, that has a tendency of being the case. But, I’m here now.”
“So, my future wife spirit, why have you come today?”
She smirked as she stood, and turned towards me.
“I am here to spend a little time with you. The time will come soon when we meet, and you’ve had a lot of problems lately.”
I looked at her with a little disbelief, and decided that now would be the best time to really challenge her and see if she was exactly what she said she was.
“Okay, what would some of these problems be?”
“Well, you hate your job and want to get away from there, but you can’t because you need the money to pay the bills that got you the job in the first place.”
I pikued at this. Okay, first guess is a lucky one.
“Then, in the process of forgetting what happened before when I last visited, you became lonely and were thinking about an old girlfriend of yours.”
Okay, that froze me.
“That’s why it was decided for me to come over here and spend a little time with you while my person sleeps.”
This is the point where I suddenly felt sad about everything, and that she knew so much about what was going on. It was pathetic, that I seemed to be so hopeless in my life, that I needed a reminder about things from the spirit of my future wife. I even started to shed a couple of tears, which made her sit beside me on the floor by my bed. She brushed her finger against my face, and the cold appendage took away one of my tears.
“But how can I even trust you? I mean, you say all of these things, and I remember asking you about your service to Christ before. But, still, you’re just a spirit. How am I supposed to know if this is truly happening, or if I’m being tricked?”
She sat for a second, and said something that I never would have expected.
“I think that “go with your gut” would be good advice.”
Aaaand that’s where I became sold on the idea that this was, in fact, the spirit of my future wife.
That night, I pretty much told her everything. Everything I felt, everything that I was dealing with. And I talked about my regrets to her.
She giggled at my suggestion, and she smiled. Before we knew it, the night had passed and there was dawn that was about to break. She looked up and gasped.
“Oh, this is not good. I’m going to be waking up soon, and I don’t want to leave.”
“What would happen if you did stay?”
“Simply put, I would disappear. Consciousness would wake my dreaming self, and until the next major time I’d dream, I would not be able to come here.”
The thought of her disappearing in front of me was not a good one for my psyche.
“It’s a cold morning, my guardian wife spirit. You should fly back to yourself. Don’t worry about me, I think I’ll be fine now.”
She smiled at me, and gave me a ghostly kiss on my forehead. It…felt cold, but yet warm at the same time.
“I will hopefully see you in the waking world very soon. Keep praying for me, that you’ll see me. And keep yourself ready. Christ’s gonna make things happen in pretty short order here.”
I was about to say something, but she suddenly wisped out of the room and through the window. As the first crack of sunlight started rising above the buildings, I was filled with a bit of sadness, and yet a little bit of hope.
“She’s actually out there,” I said to myself, as I proceeded to call my boss and leave a message saying that I was sick for the day. Yeah, after this event, there was no way I was going into work.
Music and Fiction 