"Minutes crawl like spiders at this hour of night, skittering into the corners and under the bed. Dust bunnies waft across the floorboards in their wake while I watch for the moment that time leaps an hour into the future. Waiting for that exact second to prove I was right. That the move, beginning at Greenwich and rolling ever westward through time zone after time zone, to steal away an hour from each sets the fabric of space/time in motion, too. Treating time as a malleable thing makes it so. Consensual reality builds momentum, a certain inertia of perception, if you will. As an intellectual exercise, we all agree to change time. And while we wink and nod, time really does change.
Tonight. I prove it. I built a device. Time piece, of course. LED so it doesn't completely destroy the battery pack. How embarrassing would it be to travel into the future and have your batteries die, right? So, no. The actual temporal distortion field cannot be battery powered. Unless you've patented a double A nuclear fusion model no one's told me about. No, for that, I tapped into the grid for the particle accelerator in the physics lab. The wire run was a bitch, but never mind that. Call me old fashioned. I know it's all Disney's Bed Knobs and Broomsticks, but yes. I did turn my bed into my time machine. If I'm right, and I think I am, I will go forward in time and only forward because that is the direction of our consensual momentum--humans agreeing to pretend it's an hour later than it really is. I'll have to wait for spring to test going back in time.
Look. It's almost time. To the future, then. Hong, Jamie, I know I've been weird for the past few weeks. This is why. Sorry I couldn't tell you what I was doing. I'll see you guys in three days when you catch up with me in time.
Penny"
Jamie clapped a hand to her mouth and stared with wide, red, tear-filled eyes at her friend Hong who folded the note and slipped it back into her jacket pocket. Jamie risked a glance down at the newly erected headstone.
Penelope Jackson
April 8, 1997-March 15, 2016
"Oh my God," Jamie whispered. "You don't think it worked, do you? It can't have worked!""Of course not," Hong said. "How could you time travel into your own grave? Your own coffin. Of course it didn't work. For her, there was no day three. Not when she died on day two."
Jamie choked on a sob.
A spider crawled down the face of the marker and began spinning her web.
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