by William Riling

Chapter Two

Pray and Predator.

To spot him one would have to look hard, even if you knew what you were looking for. It’s not like looking for where Waldo might be, it was more like trying to decipher an optical illusion or visual brainteaser where colors and patterns meld into a complex background, and you must search for a discernible shape.

Deep in the mountainside thicket, surrounded by a platoon of white birch and Aspen trees, Cody Sawyer knelt under a canopy of golds, reds, greens and browns perched fifteen feet up a tree on a metal stand assembled that sunrise. Dressed head to toe in chameleon grade cam-gear, his ice blue eyes were the only divergence set against the greens and browns of his hunter’s face paint, he meshed perfectly with the surrounding foliage.

The hunter went unnoticed even by nearby birds waking to another day of harsh survival. Their trill reminded him of the old saying his Ute Indian grandfather had taught him. Cody whispered through a nostalgic smile, “Whici-ci pu-nikya-pu ga pu-ka-wu-u-ka up kaa-qha-y.” A rough English translation would be; ”The morning bird works hard but always remembers to sing.” It was a call to remember that no matter how rough life got one can always find something good to sing about.

The son of ethnically mixed parents, Cody never had doubts about his identity. His Irish father, an ex-cop with Aurora PD, and his Ute mother, a corporate lawyer, both were lost to him when he was only seven. Adding to the upheaval he was sent to live on the reservation with his maternal grandfather. A life much different than the suburban, middle class one he had known.

It was his grandfather who raised him, taught him how to hunt and fish, taught him of his native culture and history, taught him both the Ute and sign languages. All the while he reminded Cody to never forget his paternal roots. He made sure by example that Cody understood both were the source of a genetic family curse that led his father to plow the family car into a hundred year old oak tree one moonlit Christmas Eve. Alcoholism. The grandfather understood it was same disease that over time was eroding his own brain and liver.

Beneath the face paint Cody’s skin had the brown hue of his native Ute tribe. His facial features were chiseled, yet smooth, less round than other western aboriginals. A sharp nose bridged the dark brows shading his crystal blue irides. Eyes clear as they were intense. Focused and penetrating. A hunter’s eyes. They accompanied a smile of straight, rigid, white teeth framed by facial lines creasing a square jaw making him resemble a young Charles Bronson, if Bronson had the smooth features of a GQ model.

A 3/4 inch arrow shaped scar angled above his left brow pointed to his steely stare. It was a remnant from the tragic accident when his seven year old head hit the metal ashtray embedded behind the seat of the front passenger side in his father’s car. The family of three were in their ’64 Rambler Station Wagon, pool chalk blue with rusting bumpers. The car impacted a tree with a horrible force. Wearing no seatbelt, the back seat had stopped the boy’s momentum and kept him from following his mother through the windshield while knocking him unconscious. His father wasn’t as fortunate. He died instantly, his chest caved in by the steering wheel. His mother bled out slowly from a fractured skull. Had she lived she would have been a paraplegic. Cody was the only survivor.

Being raised in what some would consider two worlds, Cody was to learn much about life’s twists and turns from each. It’s one reason he took to hunting. Like a steel cord passed from his ancestors, the gene for self-sufficiency and confidence were wrapped taut within his DNA. Cody never felt sorry for himself, never made excuses and never let the prejudices of others kill his spirit. It was the same spirit of confidence that made him want to be a cop like his father, only sober. That confidence, married to an equal spirit of independence, brought him this day to an Aspen Forest to hunt grizzly.

The tree in which he knelt was just wide enough to support his six-foot, 210 pound frame. For extra support, he attached the stand above a gnarled branch whose weight bearing confidence was not tested. An added the precaution due to the precarious location. Many a hunter have accidentally fallen from tree stands, safety lines and cords have been known to rust and break. Cody knew the stories. One hunter was impaled by his own rifle because he failed to attach a safety line, another accidentally hung himself with his support strap.

Cody’s safety line was secured tight around the tree and onto his harness. Without close inspection there was no way Cody could know the metal spine of his attaching cord bore rust from years of exposure to wet and air.

Cold autumn air bit at his exposed digits protruding from his leather archer’s glove. Snow threatened, but never delivered these last weeks of November marking the end of hunting season. It was the main reason he had taken the week off from his job with the Aurora Sheriff’s Department to hunt in a nearby range of the Colorado Rockies. He wanted to enjoy the cascade of color the dying leaves provided.

Unlike most hunters in the area, Cody chose not to layout bait and wait for bears to catch wind of the attractant mix and come to investigate. He preferred to track as his mother’s ancestors did, looking for sign and listening to the mountain. It gave him time to reconnect with the rhythms of nature that would disappear the moment he returned to work and civilization. It was how he reconnected to his past giving him the peace of mind to stay connected to the present.

His present situation, judged by an imprint he found earlier in a lake’s shoreline mud several miles back, Cody was hot on the trail of a bear of incredible size. He found traces of scat along with scratch marks clawed on some of the thicker trees nearby. Bears this time of year were on a countdown of their last days before hibernation. A relentless hunger drove them to lower elevations in search of berry bushes, fireweed, white bark, tubers and roots. An omnivore with a taste for newborn elk, deer and small rodents, a grizzly would happily consider any upright animals on two feet a menu item if the occasion presented itself. Though only four attacks were recorded since 1971, A Durango woman was found partially consumed down in Trimble only a year last.

Up until yesterday, Cody thought he was working downwind from his quarry. The further he tracked the bear, the more he could tell by monitoring the sun’s position he had been moving in a large circle in the leaf littered forest. This observation was enough to heighten his attention. He now believed he was on the trail of a very intelligent griz who might be switching roles and encircling him this very minute.

Recent history suggests if the bear became aware of Cody’s presence, it would be on the other side of the mountain and another state by now. Nearly hunted to extinction in Colorado for the past couple of hundred years most Grizzlies evolved enough sense to know to avoid humans whenever possible. But a hungry griz close to hibernation is as unpredictable as lightning in a mountain thunderstorm. To be safe, Cody opted to get his scent up above the cold current of air already chilling the forest floor turning morning dew into an icy crunch.

He chose an area that not only provided cover but offered up a smorgasbord of wild berries and roots for the bear. He figured why layout bait when Mother Nature took care of that for him?

Cody carried a Hoyt & Matthews granite bow with a Canon 450 scope and 12 strand B50 nylon test, a handcrafted shaft was set in the lock and load position. If this was the Cadillac of Crossbows then a seasoned tracker was in the driver’s seat. Cody learned from the age of eight, when his grandfather took him bow hunting for the first time, how to try and think like your quarry. That included more than just reading the tracking signs left behind. It meant getting into the head of the hunted. Where does the animal feel most comfortable? What is the boundaries of their range? Can you tell their age and experience by the way they leave a kill? Back in the day, these were all signs a Native American hunter in this part of the Rockies would know before puberty.

Cody was thinking of his grandfather and again half-smiled to himself remembering their trips. These were the good days before the bad. Fly fishing for golden trout. Hunting quail and pheasant, bow hunting deer and elk. His reminiscing was interrupted. Cody stopped smiling, cocked his head to listen. The finches had fallen silent. The skittering leaves themselves seemed to barely whisper as they swirled beneath his tree pushed by an intermittent wind.

Cody’s head swiveled 180 looking below at the forest floor. He caught movement between several trees to his three o’clock. Cody whispered. “You’re a big fella, ain’t ya?” As if on cue, the biggest grizzly bear he had ever seen, this included all the bear hunting videos he watched on YouTube, stepped into view. He saw it, but he never heard it as it lumbered over a felled tree following the path inline, right along the trail Cody had taken only this morning. He was right. The bear was now stalking him.

The griz’s padded feet stepped over the rug of leaves littering the forest floor. The wide padded paws fell nearly silent as they smothered the icy crunch of leaves beneath with each stepped. The huge bear stopped and sniffed the air looking towards Cody. Cody couldn’t be sure if the bear spotted him or could even smell him. He prepared for either outcome.

The grizzly continued forward, passing under the tree and stopping again some twenty feet away. Once again sniffing the air it looked about, as if it lost the scent. This was Cody’s moment but he didn’t want to take any chances. This bear might need two arrows or more to take him down. Cody went to check a second back up arrow would be ready on the quick. His body twisted as he reached back into the leather quiver housing six more arrows. The sudden weight shift caused the rusted cord to twist and snap. Cody heard the ping of a metal harness caliper attached to his belt fly off separating him from the safety line. He fell as the branch below gave way with a loud crack.

Cody, stand, branch and all, dropped to the ground in a heap. He felt the electric numb when his arm broke just below the shoulder, the fall knocking the wind out of him. The mechanical release for the arrow once tethered to him, broke from his wrist, the drop away rest still held the arrow nocked to the bow but now both were several feet away. Cody lifted his head to get his bearings on the griz. The startled grizzly bolted away at first then stopped and turned. Cody could swear it looked at the crossbow laying on the ground first then back to him, as if calculating the distance and if he could get to Cody before Cody could get to the bow.

With a locomotive grunt the grizzly barreled forward like a mountain rockslide. Cody thought he could feel the earth beneath him shake as the mass of fur, claw and teeth hurtled towards him eclipsing the forest from view. His near useless right arm meant he had no chance of reaching his bow. It was as if death were about to swallow him whole.

The option of flight wasn’t even a choice. That left fight and this would mean fighting way out of his weight class. The bear thundered down upon him, its weight knocking the wind out of him for a second time. Its massive paw pinned his torso. The claw cut through his hunting vest and harness like scissors through rice paper. The angle of the bear attack pushed Cody onto his left side. He used that rolling momentum to fling his broken arm in position to protect his face. The bear snapped its jaws tight clamping down on Cody’s forearm. It had been going for his throat.

Cody’s quiver was still hanging across his back containing the half dozen arrows. With his good arm, he reached above his head removing one from its sheath. The bear shook him with hellish violence and he dropped the arrow. Another shake back and Cody was able to grab the dropped shaft once more. With his left hand gripping the shaft by the center, he raised and shoved it point first deep into the right eye of the bear. The point sunk a good two inches into the griz’s eye socket. The beast howled an ungodly sound and with one swipe of a paw, the bear sent Cody rolling to right removing strips of flesh from his side. The bear went into a panicked spin, crashing through the brush in agony, pawing at the arrow in its eye, breaking the shaft in half, the business end still lodged in his skull.

It’s said a wounded animal can be unpredictable, but Cody knew exactly what this bear was going to do. This bear was going to come rip the living shit out of the person who shoved an arrow in its eye. Cody pushed himself up to his knees preparing for the final onslaught. His loaded bow lay off to his left. He picked it up but now needed the use of his broken arm to fire it. The one eyed griz came thundering back through the brush on a beeline toward Cody.

As if using the mythical Force, Cody seem to will his broken limb to work. He brought his hand up to his elbow height, numb fingers struggled to close around the bow’s mechanical release, taking aim, he pulled back with his good arm. He believed he could feel the bear’s breath as he pressed the release. The arrow loosed with a short whistling sound, piercing the skull of the half blinded bear just above the snout.

The beast dropped, sliding from momentum, it came to a halt just in front of the bloodied hunter pierced by two arrows, one broken off in its eye, one protruding from its skull. Wracked in excruciating pain Cody fell backwards, dropped the bow, catching himself with his working arm he lowered to the ground. Laying by his quarry he watched the light go out from the bear’s good eye. Cody heard it release its final breath, a wisp of vapor exited its blood filled nose and mouth.

“Jesus Christ!” Cody’s first remark came between breaths.

The adrenaline coursing through his body kept his heart rate high while masking his pain. Cody couldn’t get over the size of the beast sprawled before him. Easily ten feet from maw to hind claw. He dragged himself to the side of the bear leaning back against its bristled hide. His legs felt rubberized, they would be useless for a bit. Trying to catch his breath, he spoke.

”If it’s any consolation my friend, you scared the living shit out of me. I think I aged ten years in those few seconds.”

Cody fought back a rush of emotion boiling up from his belly. He wanted to cry and laugh at the same time but settled for hiccup-like chuckle and snort. Then leaned back, spent yet glad to be among the living. The sounds of the forest came alive. Bird song never sounded sweeter. Each breath he took was of cool mountain air clearing his lungs. His heart beat a rhythm usually achieved in a workout, yet somehow felt normal, solid, powerful. Pain was on its way, as if travelling from a far off place trying to come home.

He closed his eyes and offered a silent prayer to the Great Spirit, thanking him for this kill. A throbbing ache in his limp arm interrupted his meditation. Cody could see the bleeding gash on his arm left from where the bear bit him. He needed to fashion a tourniquet fast. He removed the strap from his quiver and grabbed a piece of his torn harness belt. It was a pliable nylon. Cody clinched it between his teeth and lifted his bad arm with the good, wrapped the belt around it cutting off arterial flow. He pulled it tight and knotted it as best as possible using one hand and his teeth.

Leaning his good arm for leverage against the bear, he stood. He removed his waist belt, shredded jacket and the balaclava used to warm his head. Looping the waist belt, he tossed it over his shoulder. From it he had fashioned a temporary sling. Cody set his mangled arm inside trying to steady himself. The adrenal rush was wearing off and the loss of blood and shock threatened to overtake him. He took the remnants from his tattered coat and pressed it against his side.

Cody gathered his gear, leaving the bent stand and a few heavy items, he assessed his situation. He was incredibly thirsty and guzzled from his canteen like a lottery winning wino. He next checked the bars on his phone. His cel was nowhere near a tower signal. He was losing blood. Slowly yes, but still losing. The fact that this was also wolf country didn’t make that point any easier to swallow. But swallow it he did. He calculated his Land Rover Defender was a good half day’s walk out of the forest. He didn’t have to do much math to figure out there was no way with only one good arm he going to field dress a 700 pound carcass. He snapped a photo on his phone using the fallen tree stand for scale.

In the only sign of respect, he could show his fallen adversary, Cody covered part of the carcass with leaves, as many as he could kick up along with the few branches he could pick up. It was the best burial he could offer. The wolves would clean up after him for sure, he thought. With a final prayer of respect for the bear, Cody began his trek back to the world. A world in which nature took a back seat and the only wolves were the humankind.

by William Riling

Chapter One.

Wednesday’s Child

Friday the 13th, 1974. Aurora, Colorado.

A massive gathering of grey clouds dragged November shadows across the high-desert city of Aurora, Colorado, as if death’s bony finger beckoned the low hanging gloom now swallowing the sunlight. A deep bass thunder echoed in distant mountains. For the superstitious of the region, an unmistakable foreboding hung in the air. A late afternoon cold front added a chill to the drama about to unfold. Outside of Woodson Junior High School, near the city outskirts, a Final Bell of the school day pierced the autumnal air.

Thirteen-year-old Alison Kayne broke from a side door in a run, her Hello Kitty backpack clinging to her for dear life. A pink Schwinn bicycle, easily visible in the crowded rack, waited for her at the far end of the sandstone building. The rose petal colored seat, fenders and basket adorned with daisy stickers couldn’t have been more girlish.

Alison reached her bike before the echo of the school knell faded. Grasping the handlebars tight, a thumb flicked the toggle of the mounted bicycle bell. Frayed salmon shaded tassels twirled from the grips as she backed it out. In one fluid motion, Alison spun the bike, stepped onto the pedal and swung into her seat as if mounting a thoroughbred. Leaning forward, she pushed forward, her legs pumping hamster-wheel fast, her blonde ponytail danced a Watusi. The bike’s bell cleared a path through the clamor of scurrying students. Alison was racing home.

1974 was to be Alison’s last year at Woodson Junior High. Next year she would be attending high school as a freshman which put her at that age where she would soon discard Hello Kitty for more mature interests like the one, she had this day. Alison pedaled with a single purpose, as she did every school day afternoon of late; to get home before 3:30 to watch her favorite TV show “Dark Shadows.”

It was a popular soap opera centered around a vampire named Barnabas Collins. Modest production values at best, the soap was all the rage at school. Alison desperately wanted to keep up with the cafeteria chatter among the other girls, all of whom followed the show with a religious fervor. But on this dark day, it was a late afternoon ritual she would never make.

Forty-eight hours later her empty bike would be found abandoned along what locals called the “Devil’s Tail,” a jogging path that serpentines like Lucifer’s own pointed appendage. The trail snaked through a wooded area only a mile from where Alison was last seen alive. It would take much longer for her body to be discovered. What was left of her remains after decomposition and insects and scavengers was unearthed a year later in a drainage ditch underneath a battered tarpaulin.

The Aurora police at the time refused to answer if she was sexually assaulted. When a suspect was named, her father replaced his anguish with a raging anger implying it was a strong possibility. Mr. Kayne took it upon himself to beat the pulp out of a high schooler from the varsity football team rumored to have dated Alison. At the time, officials cautiously referred to the boy as a person of interest. That was enough for old man Kane take matters and a tire iron in his own hands. It was later learned the suspect had a concrete alibi and was released. Not before Alison’s father had remodeled the kid’s nose and broken several of the young man’s bones. In the end, no one was ever charged with her murder and no civil suit was ever brought by the kid. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last dark day for the children of Aurora.

In 1979, twelve-year-old Rita Emerson, also from Aurora, was sent on an errand for her mother to get a carton of cigarettes and a six pack of beer. Rita made it to Graver’s Grocery, the corner store. Knowing the mother was most likely home inebriated, the owner, Mr. Gravers, sold Rita the so-called “groceries.” He added a free piece of Double Bubble chewing gum and sent her on her way. The shop keeper was one of the last known persons to see her alive. Rita was last spotted a quarter of a mile away crossing Edge Crest Road, taking the detour through the same wooded area of “The Devil's Tail” that ensnared Alison Kayne without a trace half a decade earlier. The heavily trafficked path had been hewed through the wooded area by years of joggers and hikers alike. Authorities later found the carton of cigarettes and quart of beer her mother had sent her to get, along with her chewed piece of gum. They also found her right sneaker laying in the brush off the trail.

No one in the area wondered how a twelve-year-old got hold of beer and cigarettes, it’s just the way things were done in a different part of town in a different time. Here, everyone knew each other and their families on a first name basis. Mrs. Emerson, a single mother insisting she suffered from Agoraphobia, often used Rita to keep her supplied in her crutches of choice, booze and tobacco. At first, she would provide Rita with a note, but after a time the purchases became a common occurrence. What was uncommon was for Rita not to return in a timely fashion, let alone at all. The second anomaly for this occurrence was her body was never found.

1985. Bonnie MacMillan, a young girl on the junior cheerleading squad at Woodson, also vanished. Popular and pretty, the thirteen-year-old brunette never made it home from practice. Her skateboard, decked with anime stickers, was found beneath the small stone bridge that crossed a stream dividing a relatively new local park in half. The park was constructed on a parcel of land carved out from part of the old Devil's Tail and renamed “Rita Emerson Park” in memory of the missing girl in ’79.

As for Bonnie, for two weeks search parties, including cadaver dogs, covered a four-square mile area where they managed to only turn up a blue plastic hair barrette. It was found in the parking lot at the far end of the city park. The piece was matched to the one in her school photo taken the Spring when she first wore her hair parted and back. A set of faded tire tracks were discovered nearby in dirt left by a recent rain. With her body never found she would have been filed as a runaway. One small drop of blood on the barrette landed her case with homicide department. It took less than nine months for the case to go cold.

That was 1985. Back then, a makeshift memorial had stretched the twenty-five-yard length of the parking lot and lay three feet deep. At the candlelight vigil, young girls and mothers wore blue barrettes in memory of her. Today, only a small weathered cross of faded blue and white, Woodson’s school colors, remains.

These young girls, just three of dozens of missing children over the years whose black and white Banksy-like images would be printed on the side of milk cartons statewide. They were all cold case files, considered unrelated, growing dust in a back office of the Aurora Sheriff’s Department, waiting. Waiting for justice. Waiting for rookie homicide detective Cody Sawyer to return from his weekend hunt. Waiting for the Milkman.

by William Riling

(100 word story challenge.)

"The Power Ball Jackpot is over a billion dollars! Give me two bucks." George said excitedly.

"I don't play." Lenny answered.

"What? Why?" asked George.

"I don't play because I already won." Lenny grinned.

"What do you mean ‘already won?’"

Lenny smiled at the sunset. "You know how many humans are possible? Ten to the 30th power. That’s a billion, trillion, trillion. Which means we’re the lucky ones. We're the ones who get to die. You only get to die for having lived."

George placed his finger on the trigger. "Don't move, Lenny, just keep looking at the rabbits.”

by William Riling

Professor Carlton Evers, lost in numbing thought, stared at the faded photograph pinched tightly between his thumb and forefinger, asking himself in a near silent whisper repeatedly, “What if?” “What if?” Two simple words repeating like the scratch of a record needle playing at the end of an LP. The photo in his hand was an old Polaroid, washed by sunlight, dried by the years, leaving behind contrasts one mostly finds in old-world watercolors.

The picture was of a young girl, tan and lithe, her sandy brown hair hung to her browned shoulders. Head tilted; she presented a smile that lit up her freckle kissed face while sparking a light in her electric blue eyes. Clad in a cream white bikini, as if she was posing for a postcard, she sat knees up, arms back, on a large beach towel bearing the imprint of a Union Jack flag. The towel’s design shouldn’t serve as a misdirection, the young girl was by no means British. She was from New Jersey. Had the photo also been able to capture her accent, you’d recognize it as very “South” Jersey. Carlton had won the towel for her from a boardwalk attraction on their very first date.

The photograph was of seventeen-year-old Lori Saunders, also known as Miss Ocean City ’83 and the focal point of Carlton’s summertime romance that same year. In ’83, Carlton was eighteen years old and a summer season away from attending MIT that same year on a full scholarship. With all his obvious intelligence, it still puzzled the future physicist how he could end up in a summer romance with a girl as beautiful as Lori. What could she see in him? He was after all, a Star Wars geek, an Atari nerd who still lived with his parents, possessing the social skills of a leper in a nudist camp, and as he knew all too well, still a virgin. He was by no means competition for the bronzed surfers and college jocks trolling the beaches, bars and boardwalk scamming for summer tail.

Yet it was his boyish shyness combined with his razor-sharp intellect that attracted the young beauty to him. Plus, when Carlton looked at her, he didn’t leer, he didn’t salivate, he didn’t show off or put on airs. He was a good listener. She liked that about him.

They had met at the Borden Soft Ice Cream kiosk along the 6th avenue boardwalk. She was a server. His job was to sweep that section of the boardwalk, keeping the area free from trash. Each day while working he would spend his break time by ordering a cone from Lori. It was always vanilla, like his personality.

His breaks could barely be considered brief interludes within the number of working hours in a day. They were more like eye blinks, or snatches of seconds, just fleeting moments. Lori was usually busy tending to customers. Yet over time, their small conversations about the weather, trivial things and all things vanilla, somehow managed to morph into something more.

Soon their dialog grew into a past time they like to play together they called, “Local or Loco?” It was a game they invented where they’d guess where people were originally from by their appearance and dress. The fashions of the eighties didn’t make the guessing as easy as it may sound. Disco was dying and Goth/Punk growing.

Eventually, Lori began to take her break at the same time as Carlton. Like two game show contestants they would sit on a boardwalk bench looking and secretly pointing at the tourists. Each would give a theory on where that person was from and why they thought so. Usually, the outfits were a dead giveaway. Tight bathing suits, jewelry and platform shoes on legs with zero tan pointed to the Italian guys from New York. Beer guts, baseball hats, and double entendre T-shirts, meant a Philly native. Speedos were either Canadians or Europeans. Both Carlton and Lori got a lot of enjoyment when they would find out they were right after hearing the vacationers speaking with an accent or in a foreign language.

The fourth week of June in ’83 in Ocean City there was a triple feature on a Saturday playing at the Moorlyn theatre. It had been scheduled and sold out as early as May First. It was the first two Star Wars Movies followed by the premiere of Return of the Jedi. Carlton had purchased two tickets the day they went on sale. At first, he was going to take his younger sister Sam, but call it the Force, or what have you, Carlton drew the nerve to ask Lori to join him. She agreed.

It would be their first date and followed by their first kiss under the boardwalk later that evening. For all practical purposes, other than it being Carlton’s first true love, it would also be his first broken heart. That's the side of memory lane Carlton doesn’t drive on. Suffice it to say Carlton went to MIT that fall. He became a physicist, and later a tenured professor at the school, no less. Now middle aged, with glasses and a thinning hairline, the remaining tenacious strands of hair cling squid-like to the skull that contains one of the most incredible brains to ever grace the MIT campus. Professor Carlton Evers ended his reverie with a sigh.

“What if?” He finally said aloud, setting the photograph back beneath the push pin that held it to the partition by his office desk. Once a rhetorical question borne from regret, ennui and lost love, they became two words that triggered a longing that was soon to become a desire magically leading to an incredible idea. Those two minuscule words would inspire fifty-five-year-old physicist Carlton Evers to conceive and construct what he believed to be the world’s first working time machine.

He had gazed at the photo more than once over the years. So often the ink inscription left on it was barely legible. He wished with an aching heart that he could go back to that moment in time that, at least in his fading memory, were the happiest days of his life. He held before him an image frozen in time. A place and a moment never seen before or since, never to be repeated. It was a time capsule recorded by a light sensitive negative. That’s when the aging physicist began to daydream and question “What if?”

What if all the information of that day back in 1983 was encoded into that photograph the moment the picture was snapped? What if there was a way, perhaps with the aid of a supercomputer and laser, to break down and map all that information, down to the very atomic structure of every molecule, light particle and electron recorded?

Then, what if all that atomic data could be fused or compressed into one particle, perhaps by use of a Haldon Collider, accelerated to the speed of light opening a wormhole and then, like bouncing back a radio signal, return that molecular information to its original space and time then reverse the process to send it back?

Carlton knew he would need more than a faded Polaroid to extract that kind of imprinted data. Even though the photo’s zinc paper is treated with a glossy, protective overcoat of polycarbonate compounds, the actual image taken was recorded onto a light sensitive negative that is generally tossed away when the photo develops. Besides, he understood Polaroid’s film base is coated with layers of silver halide grades, image dyes and interlayers under a transparent cover sheet. In layman’s terms it would be like trying to extract data from a comic page image that had been transferred onto silly putty.

Carlton further reasoned that a film stock made of a cellulose acetate would be much more robust. Unlike nitrate which produces its own oxygen when immersed in water, thus making it unstable, even more flammable. Whereas, in a better stock of film, the silver salts are on the emulsion layer; the light sensitive materials are suspended in gelatin and coated onto the acetate. They have a Modulation Transfer Function absorption rate of 160 lines per millimeter. That MTF reads coarse and fine details much more naturally and organically than digital images which treat everything encompassed with the same unflinching eye, so light is not recorded as much as it is interpreted by digital camera software.

The result from his nostalgic trip down memory lane; Professor Carlton Evers was on the threshold of discovering if a negative from a photograph might be the on-ramp to the expressway for time travel. That was the informal concept he took to DARPA, concluding it would take government funding to build such a device. He was surprised he received an answer within a month.

Now almost a year and a half and quarter of a billion dollars later, two men in dark suits and dark glasses, each with similar tightly cropped haircuts, entered MIT’s basement lab several steps ahead of a third man, also dressed for business, only in a lighter suit minus the sunglasses and carrying a steel attaché. In lockstep cadence, the group descended the spiral staircase down to the level where a brand-new ballroom sized Hadron collider stood behind a glass enclosed sterile chamber.

Standing upright within the enclosure was a large, circular, gold and silver coil-filled contraption, riddled with rivets, surrounded by tubes, conduits and brackets holding brackets, with cables and tubing snaking out from its base, looking like the maw of some mechanized beast from an AI generated image of alien machinery sucking down metallic spaghetti.

It had been eighteen months from when the original concept on a drawing board went to the finishing touches now being fine-tuned on Carlton’s… make that the United States Government’s, experimental time machine. However, no one was calling it that. Carlton took it upon himself and christened the device L.O.R.I., after his lost love or the Lightwave Origin Recapturing Interferometer. The anagram was a stretch for sure, but it wasn’t just an homage, it also served for secrecy, for nowhere in any schematic did they use the words, “Time Machine.”

Originally the experiment was to be simple. Take a photograph of your time traveler Tuesday morning in a room containing an object in a box. Take the negative of that photo on Wednesday and send the subject back in time. When they return, if they can tell you what was in the box, we’ll know time travel is possible. But after the expense laid out up until now, the government had much more ambitious goals in mind.

The two accompanying men took up posts on either side of the room as the man in gray set the briefcase down on a table. Carlton, dressed in PPE gear, stepped out from the collider compartment and over to his computer to input the initiating code. He opened a file, “Operation Lancer.” A code appeared. His fingers danced on the keyboard typing in a numeric prompt. The source code 20/63/327767/96.7970/^/1200 appeared skipping across the display screen. A red light began to blink on a nearby digital clock. A count down from 12 hours ticked away like a heartbeat.

Carlton then stepped over to his work bench where the mystery man known to him only as “Mr. X” had set the briefcase. The mysterious stranger then dialed in the combination. The man’s thumbs were scanned by a blue light on the edge of the latches that open the case. The light turned green; the case snapped open. The man in the gray suit turned the case to face Carlton. In the center of the case, a small white envelope lay in a postage stamp sized recessed space etched into a protective gun metal gray foam lining the case. With a pair of forceps, Carlton removed the envelope handling it as if it were nitro glycerin. He turned, making for the sterile glass enclosure protecting the Hadron collider from foreign material and contamination. A motion sensor activated the door.

The second he stepped inside the glass door whooshed closed behind him He continued through the next to the gangway leading to the center of the coil. Arriving at the coil, there was a tray of tools on a table stand off to a side. Taking another forceps, he pried open the envelope and gingerly removed a small piece of brownish acetate. With a surgeon’s touch, he placed it on a clear glass plate about an inch by an inch and a half and slid the plate beneath his microscope. Carlton squinted one eye as he peered through the aperture, he brought the item into focus.

What first caught his attention was the white glare from two sprocket holes on the left side of an image. It was immediately apparent to Carlton that he was looking at a small piece of film. Framed by black, the color image was of a group of people lining a gray street corner surrounded by brown and cream-colored sandstone buildings. The crowd appeared to be awaiting a parade. The whites and reds of people’s shirts popped off black silhouettes. An old-style streetlamp painted green stood sentry to the left. Located near dead-center of the still image, a motorcycle cop was negotiating a corner turn with another cycle cop out of focus behind him.

Professor Carlton Evers was looking at frame z007 of the Zapruder Film, one small piece from the 8 mm capture of the assassination of JFK. A much as he wanted to, Carlton’s time machine wasn’t sending anyone back to Ocean City 1983. This pioneering trip was sending someone to Dallas, Texas and the year 1963. What they hoped to accomplish was anyone’s guess, they insisted they were going back just to observe. The consensus was that every step short of not going was to be taken to avoid changing history. They wanted to know what they could do in history before they ever attempted to do anything to history. Carlton was beginning to think he knew how Oppenheimer must have felt.

Using forceps, Carlton removed the piece of film from the glass plating and lay it in a thumb drive sized compartment. He slid the component into a slot on a motherboard attached to the coil’s console and pushed it in. The room was configured as a smaller version of NASA’s mission control. Multiple computers activated at once and began processing at lightning speed. Lights in the basement laboratory dimmed, flickered and then returned as the computing task automatically drew its power from another outside source.

With its ethernet linked to the Frontier supercomputer in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the fastest, most powerful computer in the world, delineation of the data that was locked in the film negative would take a minimum of three hours to process. The image itself would be destroyed in the process by laser light atomizing the acetate causing a radioactive like decay. Carlton’s calculations left open the possibility this could affect the duration of the chronological expedition. There was no turning back. The countdown was set.

Carlton Evers wasn’t going to be making this trip back in time and he wasn’t happy about his role but understood someone had to steer the ship. DARPA insisted on providing their person to make the trip. The mysterious man who delivered the single frame of the Zapruder film was to be the first experimental “Nanonaut.” It was a term DARPA coined, combining the term “nanotechnology” to the word “astronaut.” Clever people, those government spooks.

Carlton Evers had many questions but was so wrapped up in the complexity of the launch he hadn’t had time to sort through them. Now with the film frame in place, the computations processing and the power stabilized, he took a moment to think.

Why choose the Kennedy assassination for “Operation Lancer?” Lancer, he learned, was the code name the secret service detail had given Kennedy all those years ago. But why choose that moment in history? They could, if there was 8mm color film of Nazi Germany available, and there was, go back and try to stop Hitler before he painted his first watercolor. Before he sent six million people to their deaths. Or they could choose to go back to 9/11 and save thousands from a horrific ending. Then there were the existential questions that arose automatically.

Carlton continued to posit. Say you did stop Hitler; who is to say a more effective fascist wouldn’t rise to power? Someone more tactical, more hateful, more efficient than him? Or what if you stopped 9/11 in 2001 only to have a dirty bomb placed there in 2002 and kill three times as many people? There it was, that nagging “What if” question again. A billion possible outcomes and a billion possible mistakes.

Add to it all the possibility that maybe all you’re doing is creating an offshoot reality. A parallel universe, existing in its own space/time continuum. Would you no longer exist in the former? Does it just become another bubble in the multiverse? What if you crossed paths with your younger self? Unknowingly brought Covid back in time with you? Stepped on a butterfly? It was enough to think oneself into a headache. It didn’t matter, the clock was ticking. As the saying goes, time waits for no man. It was almost time to prepare the traveler.

The decontamination chamber was an anti-room off the back of the basement. The stark white sterile environment contained a hospital bed, side tables, medical monitors, clean towels and sheets, a shower and a flat screen TV for the Nanonaut to watch while waiting for final countdown.

In an open closet hung a gray, Beau Brummell men’s suit and matching tie from the 60’s, like something straight from the wardrobe department of the TV show Mad Men. They found it in a vintage clothing store in Kansas. A Trilby hat from the same era, purchased in a Seattle flea market, hung on a hook. A pair of black sued lace up Oxfords were discovered in Vermont, polished sat on a shelf along with an Omega Speedmaster watch purchased on eBay. Every item was manufactured in the sixties. Carlton felt this would help make a smoother transference having atomic similarities to the destination year while helping the time traveler visually fit into the era.

The Nanonaut, Mr. X, was currently in the MIT cafeteria having a final meal with the launch crew before his journey. The fare was bullion, tofu with a little chicken meat added out of sympathy. Carlton was doing last minute tests on the heart monitor and ekg machines, syncing them to the main system. They record the body’s reactions up until the last second.

Carlton reached to calibrate the monitor; he bumped a side table. The attaché popped open an inch. Why something so secure was left unlocked aroused Carlton’s curiosity. With furtive glances to make sure no one was watching; he opened the case. He found the reason it wasn’t closed properly. The gray foam that protected the frame of film was pried up and askew. Carlton peeked under the material.

Laying beneath that foam on a thinner layer was a High Standard HD 22., the CIA’s weapon of choice. A silencer, shoulder holster and portable aluminum stock sat alongside it. He reset the foam the way he found it. Carlton realized this was no DARPA scientist they were sending back in time. This man was CIA through and through.

Carlton began to rifle through rest of the suitcase’s sleeves. He found a Manila envelope. He hesitated a beat and opened it. In it was a three-page dossier with the title “Operation Lancer” stamped across it the words, “TOP SECRET.” The first page had a picture of a young man in jacket and tie and hair cropped like Mr. X’s. The info stated the man’s name was Jack Kyleford.

Carlton wondered if the man was any relation to Presidential candidate John Kyleford, the Republican front runner for President. But it couldn’t be. This man’s age was listed as 24. Height, 6 foot, 0 inches, weight 202. Vice President John Kyleford was thin, barely six feet tall and 82 years old. There was a serial number followed by the words “Operation Mongoose. “At the end of this man Kyleford’s bio, the words, “INTERCEPT/TERMINATE.”

On the second page a photo was pixelated, the bio was redacted with swaths of black ink covering most of the copy. Still, Carlton recognized the silhouetted form as Lee Harvey Oswald. The three names were blacked out as well as his serial number. It was also followed by “Operation Mongoose.” There was no instruction after his name. It read: D.O.A.

The final page and photo took Carlton’s breath away. It was from his MIT I.D. It had a few lines of biographical information containing his name and social security number followed by the words, “Operation Lancer” and the instruction, TERMINATE. He had to read it several times as he stared at the word then back to his photo.

Carlton shoved the pages back into the envelope with an unsteady hand but forgetting the sleeve he took them from, he jammed them into the first one and closed the attaché. His heart moved like a thumping rabbit’s foot. Adrenaline raced through his nervous system.

“Holy fuck. The CIA want me dead.” A thousand thoughts crowded for attention. Why kill me? Was the assassination a CIA plot? Was Mr. X on the grassy knoll? Did they kill Oswald? Kennedy? Who is Kyleford? Perhaps he’s the second shooter? What is “Operation Mongoose”? He couldn’t let the test continue, could he?

Carlton turned to the gray suit hanging on the rack, then out through the window of the decontamination room door. He saw the collider still counting down. One did not have to be a physics professor to add together what he was thinking at that moment.

Carlton changed clothes as if he was late for his own wedding. The arms of the Beau Brummell suit coat rode up above his wrists revealing the white sleeves of the pressed dressed shirt he just buttoned. It was a tight fit. He surprised himself when he remembered how to tie a Windsor knot, which he was now doing at breakneck speed; Cross wide end over narrow, loop, cross again, loop, pass wide end through loop and pull.

“Close enough” he thought as he shorted the front part. The pant legs revealed a little too much ankle, but the argyle socks were doing their job, so it wasn’t too noticeable. He strapped on the wristwatch laying on the table and checked the time. It was synched up with the computer in the other room. Carlton stepped to the mirror and put on the charcoal Trilby with a red and gray hat band. Looking like he stepped out of a 1960’s cigarette ad, he started for the door and paused. He had one more accessory to consider. He stepped back to the suitcase. Lifting the foam he considered the gun in its suppressor-ready shoulder holster. Carlton removed his jacket one last time.

A minute later, Carlton stepped out of the decon chamber and crossed toward the main computer bank. He removed his hat, sat and took up pen and pencil. He began writing a few calculations on a clipboard. He was going to have to help the Frontier computer speed up its processing time. There were still a good three hours before operational initiation. He needed to go in the next three minutes. It was almost time for Mr. X and his team to begin preparation. They could arrive any moment. Carlton typed in the new source code instructing the power surge protectors that controlled energy flow to seek more of it.

Several crypto mining warehouses in the mid-Eastern United States suddenly went offline. The computers in the control room lit up like tilting pin ball machines. Carlton put on his hat. He kissed the photo of Lori taped to the control console. “Wish me luck.” He made for the Haydon Collider. “I’m going to need it.” He had no plan other than making sure no CIA Nanonaut would have a chance to fuck with history.

Stepping into the center of the Hadron ring, Carlton stood in place watching the sequence wind down from twenty seconds. Large coils behind him began to rotate in opposite directions speeding up with a growing electronic whine like a propeller to a large B-17 spinning to life. Had he spread his limbs, He would have looked just like DaVinci’s Vitruvian man.

Beneath the noise Carlton could hear muffled shouting. He saw Mr. X and his CIA compatriots scrambling down the spiral staircase, this time in a more herky-jerky stumbling manner. The inside chamber began to spark and flash like a Tesla Coil gone crazy. Blue electrical charged lighting flayed out in all directions. The concentric coils of the collider now all seemed to be spinning in the same direction. The noise reached the level of a jet engine. Carlton began to feel a G-force unlike anything he could imagine. Like his whole body was being squeezed in a vice made from broken glass. The pain felt like a dental drill digging into a raw nerve and that nerve happened to be his whole body. He tried to scream but that was sucked back into him like a vacuum. There was a blinding flash, he was gone.

What no one could tell Carlton about his time travel theory was, not if it is possible but, what if his theory works? What happens when the very matter that makes up each atom in the body, where the corporeal casing that keeps your consciousness bottled up, is instantaneously disassembled, squeezed through a space time continuum at the speed of light, transported by worm hole or a tear in space/time itself and reassembled to different time and place. Would anyone survive such a journey? How is such travel possible if the earth, a ball spinning through space, was in a completely different location in its orbit back in 1963? Would he end up floating somewhere along the orbital path marooned in the cold void of space? Carlton was about to find out.

The next thing he remembered was a feeling of nauseousness. An upset stomach was the least of the results of this trip. The pain he initially felt disappeared as quickly as it began, replaced by tinnitus, but this ringing in the ears produced more of a high-pitched whine, leaving Carlton virtually incapacitated and unable to move for the first thirty-seconds of his arrival in 1963. Add vertigo and an uncontrollable need to projectile vomit into the mix and they’re side effects no amount of Dramamine can diffuse. But where was he?

Carlton leaned against a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air warm to the touch from the mid-day sun. Judging by the make and model years of the other cars in the lot, He knew he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. After losing the contents of his stomach behind the car, Carlton steadied himself and stood to get his bearings. The day was warm, the sun shined bright, but something was off. He was standing in a parking lot behind the Texas School Book Depository. He could see the back of the Hertz Rent a Car billboard atop the building. The tinnitus was dissipating but there was a strange sound in the air, like a humming or a dull droning, like background noise at a ballgame mixed with something like white noise from a TV receiving no signal. Nothing was moving. Nothing.

He looked up to see a small flock of blackbirds frozen in place in the air. There was a large freight train on the railroad track behind him looking normal save for the static plume of steam perched still and stationary above the engine. Several people stood statue like in mid-step heading in his direction. Carlton had traveled back in time only to arrive at a place where time was frozen as well as everything else. This made no sense to Carlton’s knowledge of physics or quantum mechanics. It was as if he arrived in an actual still frame from history. “Unless…” he thought, “…We truly are living in a simulation.” If that were the case, Carlton Evers may have stumbled upon one of the greatest revelations to human existence. Before he continued with that realization, something caught his eye.

There were a few people alongside a fence to the right of the building, one man stood out. Dressed similarly to the ill fitted suit he now wore; a man was lighting a cigarette with a match cupped in his hands. Carlton moved in for a closer look.

The ground was a little unsteady for him, Carlton appeared to choose a path to the man a wino might take, swerving side to side until he gained his equilibrium. The tinnitus let up and was now at a level the same as the background noise filling the air. He approached the stranger, whose head was tilted, ready to light the smoke. Carlton recognized him instantly. It was Jack Kyleford, the man from the dossier. Carlton wasn’t sure if Kyleford could see him. It was a bizarre feeling getting no reaction not even an eyeblink at a finger snap. It was as if Kyleford was hypnotized, or Carlton was invisible.

Carlton needed to confirm the man’s identity. He noticed the man’s raised arms created a slight hitch on the suit jacket exposing his waist. Carlton could make out a badge clipped to the agent’s belt. On it, an eagle cresting the department of justice insignia of the special operations division indicated the origin of the badge. Confirming Carlton’s guess were the embossed letters F.B.I. all in caps. Opening the agent’s lapel, Carlton could see he was packing a gun. He set the lapel back in place. What was an FBI agent doing behind a fence near the School Book Depository? Carlton wasn’t sure what to do next.

He turned his attention to the wooden fence before him. A small tree on the other side had released a few leaves that hung midair, motionless above the ground. He stepped up to the fence and a familiar sight unfolded before him. It was Dealey Plaza lit bright by the afternoon sun. He saw the backs of the crowd lining the causeway. He could see Abraham Zapruder standing on the white concrete pedestal by the memorial holding his PD Bell& Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera. It didn’t go unnoticed by Carlton that frame z007 was at this very second being shot.

Carlton saw the motorcycle cops leaning into the turn from Elm Street and the background noise was a bit louder. He saw the smiles and looks of anticipation on the people’s faces, and he saw the red brick corner of the School Book Depository. He looked behind him at the human statue, Agent Kyleford, and he shook his head in disbelief. “Oliver Stone was right. It was all a conspiracy. There was a second gunman, and that man was now sixty some years in the future and running for President.” Carlton was a scientist, he paused. He needed facts and proof before concluding. He headed for the School Book Depository Building and a rendezvous with an ex-marine and sociopath.

Carlton crossed the back fence and headed down the grassy knoll towards the building’s front entrance. He passed Zapruder on the pedestal and his secretary who was helping him steady his legs as he shot the infamous film. He proceeded up the sidewalk lined with onlookers focused on the street corner. A hungering curiosity caused Carlton to increase his speed. He arrived at the front steps of the building where he froze in place, foot on stair and just as immoveable as the rest of this world he inhabited.

He drew in a breath of surprise. At the top of the stair, he could swear he was staring right into the face of Lee Harvey Oswald. He glanced back at the motorcade still frozen in place. Down Elm Street he could see Jackie’s pink pill box hat, outfit and black hair. Kennedy was obscured behind a motorcycle cop.

Carlton began to reason. If that’s Oswald, there’s no way he could have made it to the sixth floor to fire those shots. For the second time that day Carlton felt a loss of equilibrium.

He replanted his foot on the ground and took another look. Carlton recalled something about eyewitness confusion that had come up during the Warren Report. He noticed the man had the name “Billy” in script sewn onto his work jacket by his left pectoral. Carlton would later learn the man was an employee of the School Book Depository. His name was Billy Nolan Lovelady, a twenty-six-year-old stockman. From a distance the man could have been Oswald’s doppelganger. Carlton climbed the steps and slid past the group of employees sitting and standing on the stairs awaiting the President’s motorcade. He entered the dark entrance of the Depository.

The small lobby was empty save for a cigarette machine and radiator rising from the linoleum floor. Despite the stark white foyer, there was a musty smell that filled his nostrils, like wet paper that had dried out in a tobacco barn. It permeated the whole warehouse. He saw a sign that listed the publishing companies renting space in the building. A set of stairs against a tiled glass wall curved upwards braced by a wood-white railing. Carlton began to make the climb.

The second-floor Southwest corner of the building was a secretarial pool. Visible was a half dozen empty desks with signs of work being suddenly halted and recently abandoned. Paper jammed in the Selectric and Underwood typewriters, file drawers partially opened. Coffee cups left on desks with wisps of steam on hold above them. He saw a sign that read, STAIRS in all caps and a jagged stair shaped line pointing the way. He continued forward.

The third floor he could see an empty lunchroom with tables, chairs, and candy and soda machines. Half-eaten lunches and near empty bottles of coke were on the tables. The candy machine had the antiquated clear plastic pull levers. In the machine were Dots, Good and Plenty, Tootsie Roll, NECCO Wafers, Chuckles and even Candy Cigarettes. All but the later he remembered from childhood.

The machine also had a mirror and Carlton couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was his own reflection of course, he knew that. It was what his image was doing that rattled him to his core. It would go from his normal reflection, then changing to what can only be described as glitch, into a film negative version of himself. A white man with dark eyes in a dark trebly hat flashed into a dark man with white eyes and a bright white trebly hat. A negative man, so to speak.

He tried to calm himself to figure out what was happening. It dawned on him after a fifth glitch “The Zapruder Film! It’s got to be.” Carlton understood the shelf life, unless adequately preserved, of good acetate film was 70 years at a maximum. The Zapruder film was 60 years old and may have already begun a process of decay. It’s possible he was beginning to fade from this plane of existence and return to the collider or disappear altogether. He looked at his watch. The second hand was sweeping around the face. This was not the ’63 Omega watch. It was a Movado watch from the twenty-first century. Mr. X must’ve started to prepare early and switched them. Whatever the reason, it was acting like a small magnet causing this time distortion. Carlton had no idea when he might be pulled back to his timeline. He had to get to the sixth floor. He had to know, did Oswald act alone?

Carlton arrived at the six floor. Here the musky smell was more pronounced. Dust particles glinted in the sunlight pouring through the far end windows. Stacks upon stacks of books rose to the thick wooden cross beams dividing the large space into thirds. He stifled a sneeze and walked towards the Southeast windows heading for the corner. The glitch effect was happening at seven second intervals as he got closer to a stack of books piled high on an angle blocking the whole corner window from view. The background noise began to return which indicated an open window. Carlton stepped around the boxes to find himself standing diagonally to a crouched Lee Harvey Oswald.

The first thing that struck Carlton was how puny the man was. Bent on one knee, Oswald held the Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with scope to his side at a 60° angle with both hands. There were a set of boxes stacked two to three feet high in front of him creating the sniper’s nest. He was wearing a long sleeved, brownish, pattern woven shirt with a small hole in the right sleeve. Beneath it, a white crew neck tee shirt and dark khaki or chino pants, all that and his wiry frame balanced on pair of black Oxford work shoes.

By leaning a little to his right Carlton could only make out a profile view of Oswald’s face, but he could see a hawkish stare beneath a pinched eyebrow. Though almost chinless and an early receding hairline, Oswald reminded Carlton of a bird of prey’s hatchling, his tongue tucked between his lips as if he were just about to line up his shot.

Carlton could see the Kennedy motorcade heading directly for the building. The President’s limousine frozen about fifty yards back. He wondered why Oswald didn’t shoot with this viewpoint. It seemed to be a much easier shot. Then he noticed an object to his right near a column of stacked books. It was a brown three-foot piece of wrapping paper, long enough to contain curtain rods or a rifle, depending on if you were a DIY enthusiast or a warped little nobody who longed to be somebody, anybody… big. The paper wrapper was in mid fall as if it had just dropped off the nearby book stack. Carlton deduced that Oswald had just gotten into place only seconds before, indicating he was rushed and a possible explanation for the first shot missing.

Carlton had an idea. All he had to do was adjust the elevation knob on the scope and turn the power ring by the eyepiece setting it out of focus. This could disrupt Oswald more than enough to miss the shot. He could also just smack him over the head with a thick Scholastic Math book from one of the boxes.

The whole changing history conundrum was interrupted. The negative glitching increased, and Carlton began to flicker like a broken florescent light bulb. He felt the nausea returning, the vertigo, tinnitus and seering pain return. Oswald stayed unmolested in 1963. Carlton left 1963 in an eyeblink.

Inside the laboratory basement Mr. X and the launch crew were scrambling about, attempting to stop the collider. Carlton zapped into existence surrounded by the dancing blue electrical charge. To everyone else, Carlton had never left. They lost visual contact only for a lightning flash moment. The machine wound down, the power levels stabilized, and the spinning Hadron Collider slowed to a stop. Carlton fell to his knees dry heaving for there was nothing left to come up except for internal organs.

The medical staff entered with a gurney and lifted Carlton from the device and wheeled him to the decontamination room. No one knew that Carlton had travelled through time. They only saw a man scream in pain and drop to his knees to wretch. They had no idea they were looking at the first Nanonaut in history, and from history.

Mr. X was livid. Cheeks flushed and ears red as he pushed passed the medical team. “What the fuck was that Evers?”

“I couldn’t in good conscience experiment with another human being’s life. It’s my theory, it’s my invention, the risks should be mine. For all I know you could have materialized in the Earth’s core or on the moon.” Carlton glanced over at the briefcase on the other side of the room. Mr. X caught the eyeline. He crossed over to the attaché and lifted the foam. His pistol, and silencer were in the holster and stock were just where he left them. Before travelling through time, Carlton changed his mind at the last second and never took the protection along with him. He was a scientist for Christ’s sake, not James Bond.

Then X opened the center sleeve in the attaché, empty. He followed with the front. He removed the manila envelope. He peeked at its contents. Satisfied he tossed it into the briefcase, locking it. He turned slowly to Carlton. “Reset the launch, we’re going to try this again. Get undressed.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” Carlton said. “The experiment didn’t work because of the brittle state of the Zapruder film itself.” He sat up in the bed and continued, “New film can be very fragile let alone sixty-year-old acetate. The scanning process created a molecular decay chain reaction. It would’ve been safer if we started with something relatively recent. You didn’t perhaps film your wedding day, did you?”

Mr. X was in no mood. He took up his attaché and signaled for his men to follow him. He held up the omega watch and signaled to Carlton’s wrist. They traded watches. X spoke without eye contact as he put on his watch. “Professor Evers, seeing as Uncle Sam footed the bill for your device, the government will be taking possession of L.O.R.I. immediately. Your services are no longer required. We’ll be bringing in a new team.” With that, the men in black turned and left. Professor Carlton Evers wasn’t about to let that happen.

President John Kyleford was elected that November. His first action had all files on the JFK assassination released through the Freedom of Information Act. The new President specifically requested the release of an FBI file that, up until this day, contained information the CIA considered too sensitive and a threat to National Security.

It was a two-page report his younger self wrote as a twenty-four-year-old FBI agent stationed in Dallas on another November day sixty plus years ago. It described his attempts to get to Oswald on the day of the shooting. He discovered a copy of the Presidents route in an envelope addressed to Alek Hidell’s post office box. Alek Hidell was Oswald’s alias. The same name he purchased the gun under. There was no return address.

Kyleford attained the letter with a warrant based on Oswald’s possible participation in the Bay of Pigs and “Operation Mongoose.” That day Special Agent Jack Kyleford was on his way to detain Oswald. Before he could, he was intercepted by two CIA agents who were not conspiring to kill the President but bent on covering up any entanglements related to “Operation Mongoose.”

The President’s second executive order was to begin a complete overhaul of the Central Intelligence Agency by rooting out the agency within the agency. The divisions that created clandestine operations without oversight like Mongoose. He also added a firewall to the NSA. Checks and balances were the order of the day.

“Operation Lancer” was exposed within the Department of Homeland Security but remained classified within the very top echelons of the government. It was revealed to be an attempted hit on the younger Kyleford to get him from writing the report that implicated the CIA in the first place. The agency knew Kyleford had written one but had no idea where it was these past decades. It was a ticking time bomb as far as they were concerned, and the best solution was if it was never reported. They were willing to sacrifice John Kyleford’s contribution to history to diffuse that bomb. The entire plan, like the conspiracy, was a coverup.

It would never be known who sent Alek Hidell the map, despite the Mexican postage, but it was certain he never received it. Lee Harvey Oswald at least on that day, acted alone. Was he influenced by outside entities? Quite possibly.

What was a certainty is none of this would have come to light had not Professor Carlton Evers upon his return from the past contacted then Presidential candidate John Kyleford and blew the whistle on “Operation Lancer.” At first Kyleford was dismissive of the Professor, but Carlton knew he could convince him when he personally handed the President-to-be the FBI Special Agent badge Kyleford wore many, many years ago. Carlton had pilfered it as evidence, bringing it back with him from 1963, the year Kyleford mysteriously lost it.

Today is Tuesday. Professor Carlton Evers is staring again at Polaroid of Lori Sanders on the beach towel. He knows there isn’t enough data in that picture to risk another trip back in time. He also learned he had developed acute Leukemia from his first time-travelling excursion. The radiation exposure was never considered in the calculations. Its rapid progression meant he had months maybe weeks before he succumbed to the cancer. Carlton turned the photo over.

On the back of every Polaroid from that era there’s a ten-digit number representing the month of production, year of production, machine used, film type and day the film was produced. There’s a whole market on eBay for old Polaroid stock. Carlton ordered a box of the 600 film with that exact production number and found it. For a little less than 35 bucks he now possessed the same negative composite material needed. Added to Lori’s photo, it might provide enough data for the Haldon collider to send him back to Ocean City and 1983 and that beautiful beach day. If not, he had nothing to lose. Cancer and or Mr. X were waiting in the shadows.

This would be a one-way trip. But first a quick hack. By inputting a time code virus that could wipe clean all the data and software that controlled the Time Machine, Evers made sure no one could ever follow. There were too many unpredictable outcomes for his liking. It was better no one else have the power.

Carlton stepped into the chamber wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, tank top under a blue Hawaiian shirt, knee socks, sandals and sunglasses from ’83. He wondered if he could be seen would his younger self and Lori figure out where he was from. He was going back not to engage but to observe one of the happiest days of his life. He would see himself as he wished to be remembered and Lori would be eternally young and not have died in a car accident the year following their meeting. He set the new composite photo of Lori Saunders into the slot revealing the faded inscription under the laser light. “2 Evers, 4 Ever. Love, Lori.”

Tentacles of blue lightning arced throughout the chamber followed by a blinding flash of blue light. Professor Carlton Evers was gone. History.

by William Riling

Professor Carlton Evers, lost in numb thought, stared at the faded photograph pinched tight between his thumb and forefinger, asking himself in a near silent whisper over and over again, “What if?” “What if?” Two simple words repeating like the scratch of a record needle playing at the end of an LP. The photo in his hand was an old Polaroid, washed by sunlight, dried by the years, leaving behind contrasts one mostly finds in old-world watercolors.

The picture was of a young girl, tan and lithe, her sandy brown hair hung to her browned shoulders. Head tilted, she presented a smile that lit up her freckle kissed face while sparking a light in her electric blue eyes. Clad in a cream white bikini, as if she was posing for a postcard, she sat knees up, arms back, on a large beach towel bearing the imprint of a Union Jack flag. The towel’s design shouldn’t serve as a misdirection, the young girl was by no means British. She was from New Jersey. Had the photo also been able to capture her accent, you’d recognize it as very “South” Jersey. Carlton had won the towel for her from a boardwalk attraction on their very first date.

The photograph was of seventeen-year-old Lori Saunders, also known as Miss Ocean City ’83 and the focal point of Carlton’s summertime romance that same year.

In ’83, Carlton was eighteen years old and a summer season away from attending MIT that same year on a full scholarship. With all his obvious intelligence, it still puzzled the future physicist how he could end up in a summer romance with a girl as beautiful as Lori. What could she see in him? He was after all, a Star Wars geek, an Atari nerd who still lived with his parents, possessing the social skills of a leper in a nudist camp, and as he knew all too well, still a virgin. He was by no means competition for the bronzed surfers and college jocks trolling the beaches, bars and boardwalk scamming for summer tail.

Yet it was his boyish shyness combined with his razor-sharp intellect that attracted the young beauty to him. Plus, when Carlton looked at her, he didn’t leer, he didn’t salivate, he didn’t show off or put on airs. He was a good listener. She liked that about him.

They had met at the Borden Soft Ice Cream kiosk along the 6th avenue boardwalk. She was a server. His job was to sweep that section of the boardwalk, keeping the area free from trash. Each day while working he would spend his break time by ordering a cone from Lori. It was always vanilla, like his personality.

His breaks could barely be considered brief interludes within the number of working hours in a day. They were more like eye blinks, or snatches of seconds, just fleeting moments. Lori was usually busy tending to customers. Yet over time, their small conversations about the weather, trivial things and all things vanilla, somehow managed to morph into something more.

Soon their dialog grew into a past time they like to play together they called, “Local or Loco?” It was a game they invented where they’d guess where people were originally from by their appearance and dress. The fashions of the eighties didn’t make the guessing as easy as it may sound. Disco was dying and Goth/Punk growing.

Eventually, Lori began to take her break at the same time as Carlton. Like two game show contestants they would sit on a boardwalk bench looking and secretly pointing at the tourists. Each would give a theory on where that person was from and why they thought so. Usually, the outfits were a dead giveaway. Tight bathing suits, jewelry and platform shoes on legs with zero tan pointed to the Italian guys from New York. Beer guts, baseball hats, and double entendre T-shirts, meant a Philly native. Speedos were either Canadians or Europeans. Both Carlton and Lori got a lot of enjoyment when they would find out they were right after hearing the vacationers speaking with an accent or in a foreign language.

The fourth week of June in ’83 in Ocean City there was a triple feature on a Saturday playing at the Moorlyn theatre. It had been scheduled and sold out as early as May First. It was the first two Star Wars Movies followed by the premiere of Return of the Jedi. Carlton had purchased two tickets the day they went on sale. At first, he was going to take his younger sister Sam, but call it the Force, or what have you, Carlton drew the nerve to ask Lori to join him. She agreed.

It would be their first date and followed by their first kiss under the boardwalk later that evening. For all practical purposes, other than it being Carlton’s first true love, it would also be his first broken heart. That's the side of memory lane Carlton doesn’t drive on. Suffice it to say Carlton went to MIT that fall. He became a physicist, and later a tenured professor at the school, no less. Now middle aged, with glasses and a thinning hairline, the remaining tenacious strands of hair cling squid-like to the skull that contains one of the most incredible brains to ever grace the MIT campus. Professor Carlton Evers ended his reverie with a sigh.

“What if?” He finally said aloud, setting the photograph back beneath the push pin that held it to the partition by his office desk. Once a rhetorical question borne from regret, ennui and lost love, they became two words that triggered a longing that was soon to become a desire magically leading to an incredible idea. Those two minuscule words would inspire fifty-five-year-old physicist Carlton Evers to conceive and construct what he believed to be the world’s first working time machine.

He had gazed at the photo more than once over the years. So often the ink inscription left on it was barely legible. He wished with an aching heart that he could go back to that moment in time that, at least in his fading memory, were the happiest days of his life. He held before him an image frozen in time. A place and a moment never seen before or since, never to be repeated. It was a time capsule recorded by a light sensitive negative. That’s when the aging physicist began to daydream and question “What if?”

What if all the information of that day back in 1983 was encoded into that photograph the moment the picture was snapped? What if there was a way, perhaps with the aid of a supercomputer and laser, to break down and map all that information, down to the very atomic structure of every molecule, light particle and electron recorded?

Then, what if all that atomic data could be fused or compressed into one particle, perhaps by use of a Haldon Collider, accelerated to the speed of light opening a wormhole and then, like bouncing back a radio signal, return that molecular information to its original space and time then reverse the process to send it back?

Carlton knew he would need more than a faded Polaroid to extract that kind of imprinted data. Even though the photo’s zinc paper is treated with a glossy, protective overcoat of polycarbonate compounds, the actual image taken was recorded onto a light sensitive negative that is generally tossed away when the photo develops. Besides, he understood Polaroid’s film base is coated with layers of silver halide grades, image dyes and interlayers under a transparent cover sheet. In layman’s terms it would be like trying to extract data from a comic page image that had been transferred onto silly putty.

Carlton further reasoned that a film stock made of a cellulose acetate would be much more robust. Unlike nitrate which produces its own oxygen when immersed in water, thus making it unstable, even more flammable. Whereas, in a better stock of film, the silver salts are on the emulsion layer; the light sensitive materials are suspended in gelatin and coated onto the acetate. They have a Modulation Transfer Function absorption rate of 160 lines per millimeter. That MTF reads coarse and fine details much more naturally and organically than digital images which treat everything encompassed with the same unflinching eye, so light is not recorded as much as it is interpreted by digital camera software.

The end result from his nostalgic trip down memory lane; Professor Carlton Evers was on the threshold of discovering if a negative from a photograph might be the on-ramp to the expressway for time travel. That was the informal concept he took to DARPA, concluding it would take government funding to build such a device. He was surprised he received an answer within a month.

Now almost a year and a half and quarter of a billion dollars later, two men in dark suits and dark glasses, each with similar tightly cropped haircuts, entered MIT’s basement lab several steps ahead of a third man, also dressed for business, only in a lighter suit minus the sunglasses and carrying a steel attaché. In lockstep cadence, the group descended the spiral staircase down to the level where a brand-new ballroom sized Hadron collider stood behind a glass enclosed sterile chamber.

Standing upright within the enclosure was a large, circular, gold and silver coil-filled contraption, riddled with rivets, surrounded by tubes, conduits and brackets holding brackets, with cables and tubing snaking out from its base, looking like the maw of some mechanized beast from an AI generated image of alien machinery sucking down metallic spaghetti.

It had been eighteen months from when the original concept on a drawing board went to the finishing touches now being fine-tuned on Carlton’s… make that the United States Government’s, experimental time machine. However, no one was actually calling it that. Carlton took it upon himself and christened the device L.O.R.I., after his lost love or the Lightwave Origin Recapturing Interferometer. The anagram was a stretch for sure, but it wasn’t just an homage, it also served for secrecy, for nowhere in any schematic did they use the words, “Time Machine.”

Originally the experiment was to be simple. Take a photograph of your time traveler Tuesday morning in a room containing an object in a box. Take the negative of that photo on Wednesday and send the subject back in time. When they return, if they can tell you what was in the box, we’ll know time travel is possible. But after the expense laid out up until now, the government had much more ambitious goals in mind.

The two accompanying men took up posts on either side of the room as the man in gray set the briefcase down on a table. Carlton, dressed in PPE gear, stepped out from the collider compartment and over to his computer to input the initiating code. He opened a file, “Operation Lancer.” A code appeared. His fingers danced on the keyboard typing in a numeric prompt. The source code 20/63/327767/96.7970/^/1200 appeared skipping across the display screen. A red light began to blink on a nearby digital clock. A count down from 12 hours ticked away like a heartbeat.

Carlton then stepped over to his work bench where the mystery man known to him only as “Mr. X” had set the briefcase. The mysterious stranger then dialed in the combination. The man’s thumbs were scanned by a blue light on the edge of the latches that open the case. The light turned green, the case snapped open. The man in the gray suit turned the case to face Carlton. In the center of the case, a small white envelop lay in a postage stamp sized recessed space etched into a protective gun metal gray foam lining the case. With a pair of forceps, Carlton removed the envelope handling it it as if it were nitro glycerin. He turned, making for the sterile glass enclosure protecting the Hadron collider from foreign material and contamination. A motion sensor activated the door.

The second he stepped inside the glass door whooshed closed behind him He continued through the next to the gangway leading to the center of the coil. Arriving at the coil, there was a tray of tools on a table stand off to a side. Taking another forceps, he pried open the envelope and gingerly removed a small piece of brownish acetate. With a surgeon’s touch, he placed it on a clear glass plate about an inch by an inch and a half and slid the plate beneath his microscope. Carlton squinted one eye as he peered through the aperture, he brought the item into focus.

What first caught his attention was the white glare from two sprocket holes on the left side of an image. It was immediately apparent to Carlton that he was looking at a small piece of film. Framed by black, the color image was of a group of people lining a gray street corner surrounded by brown and cream-colored sandstone buildings. The crowd appeared to be awaiting a parade. The whites and reds of people’s shirts popped off of black silhouettes. An old-style streetlamp painted green stood sentry to the left. Located near dead-center of the still image, a motorcycle cop was negotiating a corner turn with another cycle cop out of focus behind him.

Professor Carlton Evers was looking at frame z007 of the Zapruder Film, one small piece from the 8 mm capture of the assassination of JFK. A much as he wanted to, Carlton’s time machine wasn’t sending anyone back to Ocean City 1983. This pioneering trip was sending someone to Dallas, Texas and the year 1963. What they hoped to accomplish was anyone’s guess, they insisted they were going back just to observe. The consensus was that every step short of not going was to be taken to avoid changing history. They wanted to know what they could do inhistory before they ever attempted to do anything to history. Carlton was beginning to think he knew how Oppenheimer must have felt.

Using forceps, Carlton removed the piece of film from the glass plating and lay it in a thumb drive sized compartment. He slid the component into a slot on a motherboard attached to the coil’s console and pushed it in. The room was configured as a smaller version of NASA’s mission control. Multiple computers activated at once and began processing at lightning speed. Lights in the basement laboratory dimmed, flickered and then returned as the computing task automatically drew its power from another outside source.

With its ethernet linked to the Frontier supercomputer in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the fastest, most powerful computer in the world, delineation of the data that was locked in the film negative would take a minimum of three hours to process. The image itself would be destroyed in the process by laser light atomizing the acetate causing a radioactive like decay. Carlton’s calculations left open the possibility this could affect the duration of the chronological expedition. There was no turning back. The countdown was set.

Carlton Evers wasn’t going to be making this trip back in time and he wasn’t happy about his role but understood someone had to steer the ship. DARPA insisted on providing their person to make the trip. The mysterious man who delivered the single frame of the Zapruder film was to be the first experimental “Nanonaut.” It was a term DARPA coined, combining the term “nanotechnology” to the word “astronaut.” Clever people, those government spooks.

Carlton Evers had many questions but was so wrapped up in the complexity of the launch he hadn’t had time to sort through them. Now with the film frame in place, the computations processing and the power stabilized, he took a moment to think.

Why choose the Kennedy assassination for “Operation Lancer?” Lancer, he learned, was the code name the secret service detail had given Kennedy all those years ago. But why choose that moment in history? They could, if there was 8mm color film of Nazi Germany available, and there was, go back and try to stop Hitler before he painted his first watercolor. Before he sent six million people to their deaths. Or they could choose to go back to 9/11 and save thousands from a horrific ending. Then there were the existential questions that arose automatically.

Carlton continued to posit. Say you did stop Hitler; who is to say a more effective fascist wouldn’t rise to power? Someone more tactical, more hateful, more efficient than him? Or what if you stopped 9/11 in 2001 only to have a dirty bomb placed there in 2002 and kill three times as many people? There it was, that nagging “What if” question again. A billion possible outcomes and a billion possible mistakes.

Add to it all the possibility that maybe all you’re doing is creating an offshoot reality. A parallel universe, existing in its own space/time continuum. Would you no longer exist in the former? Does it just become another bubble in the multiverse? What if you crossed paths with your younger self? Unknowingly brought Covid back in time with you? Stepped on a butterfly? It was enough to think oneself into a headache. It didn’t matter, the clock was ticking. As the saying goes, time waits for no man. It was almost time to prepare the traveler.

The decontamination chamber was an anti-room off the back of the basement. The stark white sterile environment contained a hospital bed, side tables, medical monitors, clean towels and sheets, a shower and a flat screen TV for the Nanonaut to watch while waiting for final countdown.

In an open closet hung a gray, Beau Brummell men’s suit and matching tie from the 60’s, like something straight from the wardrobe department of the TV show Mad Men. They found it in a vintage clothing store in Kansas. A Trilby hat from the same era, purchased in a Seattle flea market, hung on a hook. A pair of black sued lace up Oxfords were discovered in Vermont, polished sat on a shelf along with an Omega Speedmaster watch purchased on eBay. Every item was manufactured in the sixties. Carlton felt this would help make a smoother transference having atomic similarities to the destination year while helping the time traveler visually fit into the era.

The Nanonaut, Mr. X, was currently in the MIT cafeteria having a final meal with the launch crew before his journey. The fare was bullion, tofu with a little chicken meat added out of sympathy. Carlton was doing last minute tests on the heart monitor and ekg machines, syncing them to the main system. They record the body’s reactions up until the last second.

Carlton reached to calibrate the monitor; he bumped a side table. The attaché popped open an inch. Why something so secure was left unlocked aroused Carlton’s curiosity. With furtive glances to make sure no one was watching; he opened the case. He found the reason it wasn’t closed properly. The gray foam that protected the frame of film was pried up and askew. Carlton peeked under the material.

Laying beneath that foam on a thinner layer was a High Standard HD 22., the CIA’s weapon of choice. A silencer, shoulder holster and portable aluminum stock sat alongside it. He reset the foam the way he found it. Carlton realized this was no DARPA scientist they were sending back in time. This man was CIA through and through.

Carlton began to rifle through rest of the suitcase’s sleeves. He found a Manila envelope. He hesitated a beat and opened it. In it was a three-page dossier with the title “Operation Lancer” stamped across it the words, “TOP SECRET.” The first page had a picture of a young man in jacket and tie and hair cropped like Mr. X’s. The info stated the man’s name was Jack Kyleford.

Carlton wondered if the man was any relation to Presidential candidate John Kyleford, the Republican front runner for President. But it couldn’t be. This man’s age was listed as 24. Height, 6 foot, 0 inches, weight 202. Vice President John Kyleford was thin, barely six feet tall and 82 years old. There was a serial number followed by the words “Operation Mongoose.”At the end of this man Kyleford’s bio, the words, “INTERCEPT/TERMINATE.”

On the second page a photo was pixelated, the bio was redacted with swaths of black ink covering most of the copy. Still, Carlton recognized the silhouetted form as Lee Harvey Oswald. The three names were blacked out as well as his serial number. It was also followed by “Operation Mongoose.” There was no instruction after his name. It read: D.O.A.

The final page and photo took Carlton’s breath away. It was from his MIT I.D. It had a few lines of biographical information containing his name and social security number followed by the words, “Operation Lancer” and the instruction, TERMINATE. He had to read it several times as he stared at the word then back to his photo.

Carlton shoved the pages back into the envelope with an unsteady hand but forgetting the sleeve he took them from, he jammed them into the first one and closed the attaché. His heart moved like a thumping rabbit’s foot. Adrenaline raced through his nervous system.

“Holy fuck. The CIA want me dead.” A thousand thoughts crowded for attention. Why kill me? Was the assassination a CIA plot? Was Mr. X on the grassy knoll? Did they kill Oswald? Kennedy? Who is Kyleford? Perhaps he’s the second shooter? What is “Operation Mongoose”? He couldn’t let the test continue, could he?

Carlton turned to the gray suit hanging on the rack, then out through the window of the decontamination room door. He saw the collider still counting down. One did not have to be a physics professor to add together what he was thinking at that moment.

Carlton changed clothes as if he was late for his own wedding. The arms of the Beau Brummell suit coat rode up above his wrists revealing the white sleeves of the pressed dressed shirt he just buttoned. It was a tight fit. He surprised himself when he remembered how to tie a Windsor knot, which he was now doing at breakneck speed; Cross wide end over narrow, loop, cross again, loop, pass wide end through loop and pull.

“Close enough” he thought as he shorted the front part. The pant legs revealed a little too much ankle, but the argyle socks were doing their job, so it wasn’t too noticeable. He strapped on the wristwatch laying on the table and checked the time. It was synched up with the computer in the other room. Carlton stepped to the mirror and put on the charcoal Trilby with a red and gray hat band. Looking like he stepped out of a 1960’s cigarette ad, he started for the door and paused. He had one more accessory to consider. He stepped back to the suitcase. Lifting the foam he considered the gun in its suppressor-ready shoulder holster. Carlton removed his jacket one last time.

A minute later, Carlton stepped out of the decon chamber and crossed toward the main computer bank. He removed his hat, sat and took up pen and pencil. He began writing a few calculations on a clipboard. He was going to have to help the Frontier computer speed up its processing time. There were still a good three hours before operational initiation. He needed to go in the next three minutes. It was almost time for Mr. X and his team to begin preparation. They could arrive any moment. Carlton typed in the new source code instructing the power surge protectors that controlled energy flow to seek more of it.

Several crypto mining warehouses in the mid-Eastern United States suddenly went offline. The computers in the control room lit up like tilting pin ball machines. Carlton put on his hat. He kissed the photo of Lori taped to the control console. “Wish me luck.” He made for the Haydon Collider. “I’m going to need it.” He had no plan other than making sure no CIA Nanonaut would have a chance to fuck with history.

Stepping into the center of the Hadron ring, Carlton stood in place watching the sequence wind down from twenty seconds. Large coils behind him began to rotate in opposite directions speeding up with a growing electronic whine like a propeller to a large B-17 spinning to life. Had he spread his limbs, He would have looked just like DaVinci’s Vitruvian man.

Beneath the noise Carlton could hear muffled shouting. He saw Mr. X and his CIA compatriots scrambling down the spiral staircase, this time in a more herky-jerky stumbling manner. The inside chamber began to spark and flash like a Tesla Coil gone crazy. Blue electrical charged lighting flayed out in all directions. The concentric coils of the collider now all seemed to be spinning in the same direction. The noise reached the level of a jet engine. Carlton began to feel a G-force unlike anything he could imagine. Like his whole body was being squeezed in a vice made from broken glass. The pain felt like a dental drill digging into a raw nerve and that nerve happened to be his whole body. He tried to scream but that was sucked back into him like a vacuum. There was a blinding flash, he was gone.

What no one could tell Carlton about his time travel theory was, not if it is possible but, what if his theory works? What happens when the very matter that makes up each atom in the body, where the corporeal casing that keeps your consciousness bottled up, is instantaneously disassembled, squeezed through a space time continuum at the speed of light, transported by worm hole or a tear in space/time itself and reassembled to different time and place. Would anyone survive such a journey? How is such travel possible if the earth, a ball spinning through space, was in a completely different location in its orbit back in 1963? Would he end up floating somewhere along the orbital path marooned in the cold void of space? Carlton was about to find out.

The next thing he remembered was a feeling of nauseousness. An upset stomach was the least of the results of this trip. The pain he initially felt disappeared as quickly as it began, replaced by tinnitus, but this ringing in the ears produced more of a high-pitched whine, leaving Carlton virtually incapacitated and unable to move for the first thirty-seconds of his arrival in 1963. Add vertigo and an uncontrollable need to projectile vomit into the mix and they’re side effects no amount of Dramamine can diffuse. But where was he?

Carlton leaned against a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air warm to the touch from the mid-day sun. Judging by the make and model years of the other cars in the lot, He knew he wasn’t in Kansas anymore. After losing the contents of his stomach behind the car, Carlton steadied himself and stood to get his bearings. The day was warm, the sun shined bright, but something was off. He was standing in a parking lot behind the Texas School Book Depository. He could see the back of the Hertz Rent a Car billboard atop the building. The tinnitus was dissipating but there was a strange sound in the air, like a humming or a dull droning, like background noise at a ballgame mixed with something like white noise from a TV receiving no signal. Nothing was moving. Nothing.

He looked up to see a small flock of blackbirds frozen in place in the air. There was a large freight train on the railroad track behind him looking normal save for the static plume of steam perched still and stationary above the engine. Several people stood statue like in mid-step heading in his direction. Carlton had traveled back in time only to arrive at a place where time was frozen as well as everything else. This made no sense to Carlton’s knowledge of physics or quantum mechanics. It was as if he arrived in an actual still frame from history. “Unless…” he thought, “…We truly are living in a simulation.” If that were the case, Carlton Evers may have stumbled upon one of the greatest revelations to human existence. Before he continued with that realization, something caught his eye.

There were a few people alongside a fence to the right of the building, one man stood out. Dressed similarly to the ill fitted suit he now wore; a man was lighting a cigarette with a match cupped in his hands. Carlton moved in for a closer look.

The ground was a little unsteady for him, Carlton appeared to choose a path to the man a wino might take, swerving side to side until he gained his equilibrium. The tinnitus let up and was now at a level the same as the background noise filling the air. He approached the stranger, whose head was tilted, ready to light the smoke. Carlton recognized him instantly. It was Jack Kyleford, the man from the dossier. Carlton wasn’t sure if Kyleford could see him. It was a bizarre feeling getting no reaction not even an eyeblink at a finger snap. It was as if Kyleford was hypnotized, or Carlton was invisible.

Carlton needed to confirm the man’s identity. He noticed the man’s raised arms created a slight hitch on the suit jacket exposing his waist. Carlton could make out a badge clipped to the agent’s belt. On it, an eagle cresting the department of justice insignia of the special operations division indicated the origin of the badge. Confirming Carlton’s guess were the embossed letters F.B.I. all in caps. Opening the agent’s lapel, Carlton could see he was packing a gun. He set the lapel back in place. What was an FBI agent doing behind a fence near the School Book Depository? Carlton wasn’t sure what to do next.

He turned his attention to the wooden fence before him. A small tree on the other side had released a few leaves that hung midair, motionless above the ground. He stepped up to the fence and a familiar sight unfolded before him. It was Dealey Plaza lit bright by the afternoon sun. He saw the backs of the crowd lining the causeway. He could see Abraham Zapruder standing on the white concrete pedestal by the memorial holding his PD Bell& Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera. It didn’t go unnoticed by Carlton that frame z007 was at this very second being shot.

Carlton saw the motorcycle cops leaning into the turn from Elm Street and the background noise was a bit louder. He saw the smiles and looks of anticipation on the people’s faces, and he saw the red brick corner of the School Book Depository. He looked behind him at the human statue, Agent Kyleford, and he shook his head in disbelief. “Oliver Stone was right. It was all a conspiracy. There was a second gunman, and that man was now sixty some years in the future and running for President.” Carlton was a scientist, he paused. He needed facts and proof before concluding. He headed for the School Book Depository Building and a rendezvous with an ex-marine and sociopath.

Carlton crossed the back fence and headed down the grassy knoll towards the building’s front entrance. He passed Zapruder on the pedestal and his secretary who was helping him steady his legs as he shot the infamous film. He proceeded up the sidewalk lined with onlookers focused on the street corner. A hungering curiosity caused Carlton to increase his speed. He arrived at the front steps of the building where he froze in place, foot on stair and just as immoveable as the rest of this world he inhabited.

He drew in a breath of surprise. At the top of the stair, he could swear he was staring right into the face of Lee Harvey Oswald. He glanced back at the motorcade still frozen in place. Down Elm Street he could see Jackie’s pink pill box hat, outfit and black hair. Kennedy was obscured behind a motorcycle cop.

Carlton began to reason. If that’s Oswald, there’s no way he could have made it to the sixth floor to fire those shots. For the second time that day Carlton felt a loss of equilibrium.

He replanted his foot on the ground and took another look. Carlton recalled something about eyewitness confusion that had come up during the Warren Report. He noticed the man had the name “Billy” in script sewn onto his work jacket by his left pectoral. Carlton would later learn the man was an employee of the School Book Depository. His name was Billy Nolan Lovelady, a twenty-six-year-old stockman. From a distance the man could have been Oswald’s doppelganger. Carlton climbed the steps and slid past the group of employees sitting and standing on the stairs awaiting the President’s motorcade. He entered the dark entrance of the Depository.

The small lobby was empty save for a cigarette machine and radiator rising from the linoleum floor. Despite the stark white foyer, there was a musty smell that filled his nostrils, like wet paper that had dried out in a tobacco barn. It permeated the whole warehouse. He saw a sign that listed the publishing companies renting space in the building. A set of stairs against a tiled glass wall curved upwards braced by a wood-white railing. Carlton began to make the climb.

The second-floor Southwest corner of the building was a secretarial pool. Visible was a half dozen empty desks with signs of work being suddenly halted and recently abandoned. Paper jammed in the Selectric and Underwood typewriters, file drawers partially opened. Coffee cups left on desks with wisps of steam on hold above them. He saw a sign that read, STAIRS in all caps and a jagged stair shaped line pointing the way. He continued on.

The third floor he could see an empty lunchroom with tables, chairs, and candy and soda machines. Half-eaten lunches and near empty bottles of coke were on the tables. The candy machine had the antiquated clear plastic pull levers. In the machine were Dots, Good and Plenty, Tootsie Roll, NECCO Wafers, Chuckles and even Candy Cigarettes. All but the later he remembered from childhood.

The machine also had a mirror and Carlton couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was his own reflection of course, he knew that. It was what his image was doing that rattled him to his core. It would go from his normal reflection, then changing to what can only be described as glitch, into a film negative version of himself. A white man with dark eyes in a dark trebly hat flashed into a dark man with white eyes and a bright white trebly hat. A negative man, so to speak.

He tried to calm himself to figure out what was happening. It dawned on him after a fifth glitch “The Zapruder Film! It’s got to be.” Carlton understood the shelf life, unless adequately preserved, of good acetate film was 70 years at a maximum. The Zapruder film was 60 years old and may have already begun a process of decay. It’s possible he was beginning to fade from this plane of existence and return to the collider or disappear altogether. He looked at his watch. The second hand was sweeping around the face. This was not the ’63 Omega watch. It was a Movado watch from the twenty-first century. Mr. X must’ve started to prepare early and switched them. Whatever the reason, it was acting like a small magnet causing this time distortion. Carlton had no idea when he might be pulled back to his timeline. He had to get to the sixth floor. He had to know, did Oswald act alone?

Carlton arrived at the six floor. Here the musky smell was more pronounced. Dust particles glinted in the sunlight pouring through the far end windows. Stacks upon stacks of books rose to the thick wooden cross beams dividing the large space into thirds. He stifled a sneeze and walked towards the Southeast windows heading for the corner. The glitch effect was happening at seven second intervals as he got closer to a stack of books piled high on an angle blocking the whole corner window from view. The background noise began to return which indicated an open window. Carlton stepped around the boxes to find himself standing diagonally to a crouched Lee Harvey Oswald.

The first thing that struck Carlton was how puny the man was. Bent on one knee, Oswald held the Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with scope to his side at a 60° angle with both hands. There were a set of boxes stacked two to three feet high in front of him creating the sniper’s nest. He was wearing a long sleeved, brownish, pattern woven shirt with a small hole in the right sleeve. Beneath it, a white crew neck tee shirt and dark khaki or chino pants, all that and his wiry frame balanced on pair of black Oxford work shoes.

By leaning a little to his right Carlton could only make out a profile view of Oswald’s face, but he could see a hawkish stare beneath a pinched eyebrow. Though almost chinless and an early receding hairline, Oswald reminded Carlton of a bird of prey’s hatchling, his tongue tucked between his lips as if he were just about to line up his shot.

Carlton could see the Kennedy motorcade heading directly for the building. The President’s limousine frozen about fifty yards back. He wondered why didn’t Oswald shoot with this viewpoint. It seemed to be a much easier shot. Then he noticed an object to his right near a column of stacked books. It was a brown three-foot piece of wrapping paper, long enough to contain curtain rods or a rifle, depending on if you were a DIY enthusiast or a warped little nobody who longed to be somebody, anybody… big. The paper wrapper was in mid fall as if it had just dropped off the nearby book stack. Carlton deduced that Oswald had just gotten into place only seconds before, indicating he was rushed and a possible explanation for the first shot missing.

Carlton had an idea. All he had to do was adjust the elevation knob on the scope and turn the power ring by the eyepiece setting it out of focus. This could disrupt Oswald more than enough to miss the shot. He could also just smack him over the head with a thick Scholastic Math book from one of the boxes.

The whole changing history conundrum was interrupted. The negative glitching increased, and Carlton began to flicker like a broken florescent light bulb. He felt the nausea returning, the vertigo, tinnitus and seering pain return. Oswald stayed unmolested in 1963. Carlton left 1963 in an eyeblink.

Inside the laboratory basement Mr. X and the launch crew were scrambling about, attempting to stop the collider. Carlton zapped into existence surrounded by the dancing blue electrical charge. To everyone else, Carlton had never left. They lost visual contact only for a lightning flash moment. The machine wound down, the power levels stabilized, and the spinning Hadron Collider slowed to a stop. Carlton fell to his knees dry heaving for there was nothing left to come up except for internal organs.

The medical staff entered with a gurney and lifted Carlton from the device and wheeled him to the decontamination room. No one knew that Carlton had travelled through time. They only saw a man scream in pain and drop to his knees to wretch. They had no idea they were looking at the first Nanonaut in history, and from history.

Mr. X was livid. Cheeks flushed and ears red as he pushed passed the medical team. “What the fuck was that, Evers?”

“I couldn’t in good conscience experiment with another human being’s life. It’s my theory, it’s my invention, the risks should be mine. For all I know you could have materialized in the Earth’s core or on the moon.” Carlton glanced over at the briefcase on the other side of the room. Mr. X caught the eyeline. He crossed over to the attaché and lifted the foam. His pistol, and silencer were in the holster and stock were just where he left them. Before travelling through time, Carlton changed his mind at the last second and never took the protection along with him. He was a scientist for Christ’s sake, not James Bond.

Then X opened the center sleeve in the attaché, empty. He followed with the front. He removed the manila envelope. He peeked at its contents. Satisfied he tossed it into the briefcase, locking it. He turned slowly to Carlton. “Reset the launch, we’re going to try this again. Get undressed.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” Carlton said. “The experiment didn’t work because of the brittle state of the Zapruder film itself.” He sat up in the bed and continued, “New film can be very fragile let alone sixty-year-old acetate. The scanning process created a molecular decay chain reaction. It would’ve been safer if we started with something relatively recent. You didn’t perhaps film your wedding day, did you?”

Mr. X was in no mood. He took up his attaché and signaled for his men to follow him. He held up the omega watch and signaled to Carlton’s wrist. They traded watches. X spoke without eye contact as he put on his watch. “Professor Evers, seeing as Uncle Sam footed the bill for your device, the government will be taking possession of L.O.R.I. immediately. Your services are no longer required. We’ll be bringing in a new team.” With that, the men in black turned and left. Professor Carlton Evers wasn’t about to let that happen.

President John Kyleford was elected that November. His first action had all files on the JFK assassination released through the Freedom of Information Act. The new President specifically requested the release of an FBI file that, up until this day, contained information the CIA considered too sensitive and a threat to National Security.

It was a two-page report his younger self wrote as a twenty-four-year-old FBI agent stationed in Dallas on another November day sixty plus years ago. It described his attempts to get to Oswald on the day of the shooting. He discovered a copy of the Presidents route in an envelope addressed to Alek Hidell’s post office box. Alek Hidell was Oswald’s alias. The same name he purchased the gun under. There was no return address.

Kyleford attained the letter with a warrant based on Oswald’s possible participation in the Bay of Pigs and “Operation Mongoose.” That day Special Agent Jack Kyleford was on his way to detain Oswald. Before he could, he was intercepted by two CIA agents who were not conspiring to kill the President but bent on covering up any entanglements related to “Operation Mongoose.”

The President’s second executive order was to begin a complete overhaul of the Central Intelligence Agency by rooting out the agency within the agency. The divisions that created clandestine operations without oversight like Mongoose. He also added a firewall to the NSA. Checks and balances was the order of the day.

“Operation Lancer” was exposed within the Department of Homeland Security but remained classified within the very top echelons of the government. It was revealed to be an attempted hit on the younger Kyleford to get him from writing the report that implicated the CIA in the first place. The agency knew Kyleford had written one but had no idea where it was these past decades. It was a ticking time bomb as far as they were concerned, and the best solution was if it was never reported. They were willing to sacrifice John Kyleford’s contribution to history to diffuse that bomb. The entire plan, like the conspiracy, was a coverup.

It would never be known who sent Alek Hidell the map, despite the Mexican postage, but it was certain he never received it. Lee Harvey Oswald at least on that day, acted alone. Was he influenced by outside entities? Quite possibly.

What was a certainty is none of this would have come to light had not Professor Carlton Evers upon his return from the past contacted then Presidential candidate John Kyleford and blew the whistle on “Operation Lancer.” At first Kyleford was dismissive of the Professor, but Carlton knew he could convince him when he personally handed the President-to-be the FBI Special Agent badge Kyleford wore many, many years ago. Carlton had pilfered it as evidence, bringing it back with him from 1963, the year Kyleford mysteriously lost it.

Today is Tuesday. Professor Carlton Evers is staring again at Polaroid of Lori Sanders on the beach towel. He knows there isn’t enough data in that picture to risk another trip back in time. He also learned he had developed acute Leukemia from his first time-travelling excursion. The radiation exposure was never considered in the calculations. Its rapid progression meant he had months maybe weeks before he succumbed to the cancer. Carlton turned the photo over.

On the back of every Polaroid from that era there’s a ten-digit number representing the month of production, year of production, machine used, film type and day the film was produced. There’s a whole market on eBay for old Polaroid stock. Carlton ordered a box of the 600 film with that exact production number and found it. For a little less than 35 bucks he now possessed the same negative composite material needed. Added to Lori’s photo, it might provide enough data for the Haldon collider to send him back to Ocean City and 1983 and that beautiful beach day. If not, he had nothing to lose. Cancer and or Mr. X were waiting in the shadows.

This would be a one-way trip. But first a quick hack. By inputting a time code virus that could wipe clean all the data and software that controlled the Time Machine, Evers made sure no one could ever follow. There were too many unpredictable outcomes for his liking. It was better no one else have the power.

Carlton stepped into the chamber wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, tank top under a blue Hawaiian shirt, knee socks, sandals and sunglasses from ’83. He wondered if he could be seen would his younger self and Lori figure out where he was from. He was going back not to engage but to observe one of the happiest days of his life. He would see himself as he wished to be remembered and Lori would be eternally young and not have died in a car accident the year following their meeting. He set the new composite photo of Lori Saunders into the slot revealing the faded inscription under the laser light. “2 Evers, 4 Ever. Love, Lori.”

Tentacles of blue lightning arced throughout the chamber followed by a blinding flash of blue light. Professor Carlton Evers was gone. History.

(From a 100 word story challenge)

by William Riling

A battle of words

Will challenge any writer

If writ in Haiku.

Only one hundred

Total word count the number

Set down in this form.

Five syllables first.

To be followed by seven.

Repeat again five.

The rules are thus set.

You must not ever break them.

So be creative.

The first challenger

A wiz at playing Wordle

Wrote the first sentence.

The next person’s turn.

Did not adhere to the rule.

By writing six not five.

The judges agreed.

The contest is now over.

From one small mistake.

Haiku battle lost.

The championship is done.

Wordle Wizard wins.

(100 word short story challenge)

by William Riling

October gray. The clouds, buildings and streets of North Philly shared the seasonal hue, a harbinger of colder days coming. Sensing the oncoming winter, a squirrel skittered along a telephone wire crossing the 16th street corner, now laden with flowers. Midway along the black bridge, the animal paused at a pair of weathered Air Jordans hanging from their laces. The rodent continued on, oblivious to the dried droplets of blood spatter covering them. The blood color mirrored the red jersey hanging in rafters of an empty school gymnasium. It belonged to their star player, killed in a drive by.

by William Riling

The Romance of Jack O’Lantern

by Hercules Ellis

“Greater churl was never known,

On this earth than Stingy John;

From his door the poor were turned,

Unrelieved, cursed and spurned…

…Then since Jack is unfit for Heaven,

And hell won’t give him room,

His ghost is forced to walk the earth,

Until the day of doom:

A lantern in his hand he bears,

The way by night to show;

And, from its flame, he got the name

Of Jack O’Lantern now.”

For the past twelve years the Crow County Pumpkin Carving Contest has been won by one man, a peculiar man for sure, but with an artistry of sculpting the seasonal squash unmatched by mortal men. That’s not to say Jack McCarver was not of this world, but he certainly appeared to be treated as such by his neighbors and townsfolk alike, a spookish conjecture only to be speculated about for years to come.

Aside from his carvings, Jack Ichabob McCarver was a strange looking fellow in his own right. A circular head with the features of a ferret cramped into the center of his face, a set of hazel eyes impossible of acknowledging each other, it was no wonder he was a bachelor. He lived alone. He didn’t speak much. His dress was not untypical for the region, jean overalls over a long john T- shirt. He balanced a wide brimmed farmer’s hat over straight black hair and work boots laced to the ankles. He stands a lanky six foot tall with long arms and large thin hands that one would expect to be more calloused, him being a farmer and such, but they were smooth as a surgeon’s hands and by the quality of his pumpkin carving, just as precise.

His farm lay on the outskirts of Crow, Idaho. There, he slaughtered his own pigs and chickens, drew milk from a lone dairy cow, but his specialty was that he grew his own pumpkins. His pumpkin patch was dedicated to growing the county’s best, not necessarily the largest pumpkins around. Each Halloween he seemed to prove that point when his crop sold out.

It was late October and I saw him as the perfect subject matter for a story for The Crow Caller, our town’s local newspaper. I just started working for them only three months out of high school. I received one hundred dollars for a story I wrote about the influx of migrant workers at the meat packing plant and how the industry was exploiting minors by hiring them illegally. Pretty heavy stuff for a high schooler, I know, but my friend Eduardo Lopez suddenly stopped coming to class and I had learned why and wrote the expose for the high school paper. The Crow Caller picked it up and reprinted it and offered me a job.

Now, I needed another 100 bucks with Christmas coming up so I could get my girlfriend Sarah something nice. With Halloween right around the corner I thought why not find something not just seasonal but a bit scary to write about. There were many Legends about Jack McCarver the Pumpkin Carver.

Jack lived alone on his three acre farm and was rare to venture far from it. Except every Halloween Eve his 1950’s Black Ford pickup truck would pull into the county fairgrounds for our annual Oktoberfest and deliver the last of his crop of pumpkins along with his haunting masterpiece of a Jack O’Lantern. The contest offered a $500 dollar prize, which Jack has claimed for the past dozen and one years.

His farm was in a half mile of dirt road off the main highway. It consisted of a two story, asymmetrical, clapboard house with the gable at the front and a porch. The wood, grayed and weather beaten was built in the early part of the last century. The barn nearby just as gray but seemed to stand purely out of stubbornness rather than solid construction. Mailmen and Amazon delivery men practically threw the packages out of their trucks without stopping. People said he murdered his own parents and dines along with their corpses in the evenings like some kind of Norman Bates/Norman Rockwell supper.

Others say that they’re buried in his pumpkin patch and their spirit haunts each pumpkin grown. He sells his “haunted” pumpkins on a stand he constructed at the end of his driveway and it’s on the honor system. Leave the money, take a pumpkin. Nobody has had the guts to break the rule. Add to that the rumors he once cannibalized a census taker, when he went to cut his cable service, he hatcheted a cable man into pieces or the tale of the missing girl scout troop fed to his hogs, cookies and all and you can see there were a lot of folktales behind the legend of Jack McCarver pumpkin carver.

My car was in the shop. I had a Mini Cooper I purchased used in Junior High and let’s just say it’s cost me a mini fortune in repairs. I had to borrow my sister’s bike. It was a Schwinn, a yellow Wayfarer step-thru with a back rack. The eight mile trip to the McCarver place took about thirty five minutes and I had left at four. In the back of my mind, I was hoping I didn’t catch him and his “Weekend at Bernie’s” parents just sitting down for dinner. Or him baking actual girl scouts into cookies. Or a half dozen other scenarios gleaned from ever Saw movie I ever watched. My goal was to interview him about his art, his pumpkin sculpting. Learn his process, tools he used and how he became so interested in the art form. Look, in Crow Idaho, how far you can spit is considered an art, this made pumpkin carving high art.

I arrived in time to see his black Ford pickup come barreling down his driveway and pull out in front of me and drive towards town. I didn’t even have time to call out “Mr. McCarver!” or “Slow down, you idiot, you almost hit me!” I watched as he disappeared into the distance. I looked at the lonely farmhouse, I know it’s weird, but it gave off the same vibe of seeing a puppy dog watching it’s master leave it behind chained to a tree in the middle of nowhere. There was still light left to the day. I figured I could wait on the porch for his return.

As I sat on the weathered steps an autumnal wind blew steady across the porch, and I was startled by the creak of the front door. Either the wind had pushed it open, or someone was inside inviting me into the dark. The reporter in me took over and I did the thing they tell you never to do in horror movies; ask who’s there? Then go and find out who. I stepped in and jumped at hearing a tea pot from the kitchen scream it was ready. True to the trope, I went to investigate.

I stepped through the kitchen door relieved not to see his parents having tea and biscuits with rats crawling from their mouths. I turned off the gas under the teapot and watched the steam dissipate like a genie returning to its bottle. I thought I heard a sound. A knocking sound. It was coming from the basement. I open the door and flicked on the light switch. Nothing happened. Still, it was dark and still spooky. I’m not going down there. Then as I closed the door, I noticed behind it on a shelf a lantern and a pack of matches. The house was getting darker by the second, against my better judgement, I lit the damn thing and reopened the goddam door. I knew I would make an ace reporter someday or qualify to replace Freddy on Scooby Doo.

I crept down the basement stairs, only because the sound of every bending creak and crack demanded I creep. Surely, these were the original stairs from pioneer days when this farm must have been constructed and would give way at any moment. There was a smell of mildew and wet clay coming off the walls of stones placed in lazy patterns upon each other until forming what could loosely be considered a room. Along the ceiling heavy wood beam rafters strained to keep the rest of the house from collapsing in. Wooden shelves of dust and cobwebs held and assortment of pottery, glassware, mason jars of varying sizes, paint cans, oil cans and miscellaneous items from decades ago. A small window was covered with dirt and dust so little light filtered through, especially this far into fall when the sun set around five. The outside wind was pushing it causing the source of the banging noise.

Past the shelving, in the center of the long basement, I made out what I thought was the shadow of a man hunched down. Stepping forward, my lantern illuminated a leg shape and then revealed the rest of what turned out to be a wooden table, or a work bench. On it, a perfectly shaped pumpkin still with vine attached, looked to have been freshly picked from the patch. On the table on a leather bib spread out neat with, by order of size, were what I guessed to be the tools Jack must use for his carving. There were metal sculpting loops, steel loops the size of a thumbnail attached to a wooden handle. An Exacto knife, a putty knife, a drywall saw with what looked like prehistoric teeth, a large spoon with serrated edges kind of like a spork. Set apart and above on the leather bib, a filet knife with a wood handle and intricate runes carved into it. It looked sharp enough to cut you by just looking at it.

I held up my lantern to a shock I will never forget. The stark light from my lamp fell upon wooden shelves of about a dozen mason jars lined up in two rows. Each jar contained a liquid I guessed was formaldehyde. Floating in the liquid of each one was a severed head. Each head; eyes opened, mouth agape, features contorted. I stumbled back and almost fell into a cistern I hadn't seen. I caught myself on the edge turning to look down into the black abyss. Holding up my lantern, it revealed it to be about six feet deep. Any water once in there was gone now replaced by bones, glowing white by my light. Rib cages, and hip bones and femurs and fibulas piled a foot high in a heap.

I looked back at the macabre pantry of beheaded people and realized at that moment what Jack McCarver’s secret of success was. Those winning entries he submitted each year in the Jack O’Lantern carving contest were not pumpkin carvings as you and I have come to know them, these were the death masks of his victims, carved with the same blade Jack used to carve up his victims. A filet knife of exquisite sharpness in the precise hands of a madman and his tools, a drywall saw used to behead and dismember, spoons to remove brains, sculpting loops to flay skin, the uses were infinite.

That’s when I heard the pickup truck outside. At least that was my guess. It certainly wasn’t an Uber driver come to pick me up. I put the wick out on the lantern and placed it on the shelf trying to hide it behind one of the grisly mason jars staring back at me. The room was now virtually pitch black and I needed to hide. I felt my way around the table over to the cistern. I climbed over the edge and lowered myself into the pile of death, decay and bone. Then I remembered my sister’s bike and realized I was screwed.

I heard the click of the light switch. The stairs creaked at a much quicker rate than when I took them, so someone had more confidence in them than I had. I tried not to breathe. Maybe he’ll check the rest of the house and I could make a break for it while he was upstairs. No such luck. The room lit bright, the new light even reaching into the pit. I pressed against the side of the cistern still in darkness. I peeked to see a lightbulb swinging from a ceiling wire socket. Did he just leave the farm to buy a lightbulb? No. That’s crazy.

Jack McCarver spoke to me. “You can come out now, young man.” The voice was frog throated and sounded as if it was dragged across sandpaper. I was ready to piss myself. I did not answer.

“Or I can drag you out.” His response to my silence.

I stuttered. “I… I’m coming out.” No sense in getting physical at this stage of our meeting. I stood crunching the bone and marrow beneath my feet. I was able to jump and pull myself up, claw over the rim of the cistern and with a thrusting scramble from my feet, roll onto the floor landing behind him. I stood, shaking, aware I was cold and sweating. I heard the sound I’ll never forget. Stainless steel piercing pumpkin. Chik! In this environment it was truly an unnerving sound.

McCarver continued, his back to me. “Do you hear that sound? Cold steel stabbing into this pumpkin? Listen as I slice its flesh to remove the top so I can spoon out the insides, gutting it into a hollow shell that will become my canvas.” He stop speaking so I could hear. There was a sucking sound as he pulled off the top. He spoke again. “Did you know stabbing a human has a very similar sound and feel to it”

I watched as McCarver removed the pumpkin’s insides with a spoon, scraping and shoveling a pile of pumpkin guts onto his work bench. “It’s that moment when I stab them when my models realize I intend to gut their very souls from them. That’s when I capture the expression needed to bring my sculptures to life.”

He turned to me holding up a candle. The most important factor is the light.” McCarver lit the candle. You control the light by the depth of your carving, remove less here and more there and you create dimension, shading and shape to the art.”

McCarver set the candle down. “But the real secret? He began to pick seeds one by one out of the innards piled outside the pumpkins. These are the seeds I use for my next crop, the bloodline, so to speak, continues.” He opened his palm and showed me his “blood” seeds. He closed a fist and turned away.

He turned back to me. McCarver had picked up a knife. “Let me show you.”

I went to run, and he blocked the path to exit.

McCarver thrust his hand out, grabbing me by the neck and pinned me to the wall. I weighed half as much and a good six inches shorter. He banged my head against the wall with enough force to stun me close to unconsciousness. He spun me around and locked my arms behind my back. I felt the tightening of a zip tie and was spun round to face him again.

His smile revealed teeth as crooked as a broken fence. He held up a blade. “This is a filet knife. It is used by the top chef’s in the world. You won’t feel a thing, at first.” Jack McCarver’s Hazel eyes were otherworldly, the pupils dilated to the size of a button with a black found only in the coal mines of hell. His ferret sneer almost drooled as he pulled my shirt up and slowly began to push the knife into my gut.

He was right. Whether it was adrenaline or out right terror I didn’t feel it as inch by inch it sunk into my belly with the same sickening sound I heard earlier. My hands were locked together but I still had a free foot. I kicked at the shelving unit containing the heads and the lantern. A domino effect took place as mason jar bumped mason jar knocking the lantern down onto the candle. An explosion of flame distracted McCarver who pulled out the knife to attend to the fire. I dropped to a knee.

The drywall saw tumbled from the table to the floor laying teeth up. I dropped backwards onto it feeling the blades bite into my back. I gaged where a sawtooth was and used it to slice my plastic bonds.

McCarver almost had the fire out when I stood, and this time I pulled the shelves of the disembodied heads down. The jars burst open, and the formaldehyde exploded. I pushed through the growing fire knocking McCarver into the cistern, I made for the stairs holding my wounded torso. I heard him screaming but didn’t look back. The whole basement and its ancient artifacts were exploding and bursting into flame. The fire was racing across the rafters. I ran so fast I don’t remember touching the stairs so there was no fear of collapse.

I got safely to the kitchen. Before exiting I stopped at the stove and turned on the gas while putting the flame and pilot out with water from the nearby kettle. I let the gas run. I stumbled to the door, but not before the flames ripped out of the basement and now began to burn with purpose.

I crashed from the house holding my wound tumbling down the wooden porch stairs. My face connecting with hardened earth and dust. I could hear the flames crackle and snap behind me and feel the heat from the increasing blaze on my back. I crawled forward in pain and nausea. I tried to get as far away as possible. I tried to stand but continued to stumble.

Exhausted and losing blood I leaned on an elbow and turned to look back at the conflagration. The burning house took on the same orange glow of a jack o’lantern, the collapsing porch railings resembling McCarver’s own teeth. The hollowed darkness of the front door and empty second story windows formed the eyes and the nose. As the house disintegrated McCarver’s screaming stopped. Then came the explosion.

It only took about thirteen minutes for the emergency vehicles to show. I was lucky, the blade had missed perforating anything of life threatening importance and I only lost a pint and a half of blood. I would be out of the hospital in a day. Plenty of time to write my article for the Halloween edition.

I was a town hero, reluctant, of course. I had been paid for my story and received even more notoriety when contacted by talk shows and podcasts across the country to retell the Halloween Legend of Jack McCarver. I was a celebrity and Sarah seemed pleased with that, insisting we attend Oktoberfest to know what it feels like to be treated like royalty. I prefer a quieter, humbler existence, but Sarah’s never even been out of Crow County, so I wanted her to feel special if that’s what she desired.

Besides, with the ghost of Jack McCarver’s evil doings behind us, the quiet hamlet of Crow, Idaho could return to the normalcy of beer drinking, pie eating contests and wearing lederhosen in October. I stopped to get Sarah a candy apple. I reached in my pocket for cash. I felt something strange. What I pulled out nearly stopped my heart. I had to get over to the pumpkin carving contest. I ran through the crowd pulling Sarah after me. We arrived at the display. I froze in place.

The center pumpkin on the top tier already had the first place ribbon attached. The image carved so intricately, backlit with the amber glow of hot embers, detailed to perfection on the orb shape, with translucent highlights, was a face I can never get out of my mind. It was MY face. The face I must have had as Jack McCarver penetrated my abdomen with his filet knife and held it there waiting for me to realize I was about to die. A face twisting in fear, contorting in question and bewilderment. Despite the fact I fought back and survived, I knew he got from me what he wanted and now was taking first prize for a fourteenth year.

The entry was submitted by a Jim Smith who never claimed the prize. Only I knew "Jim" could be an acronym for Jack Ichabob McCarver. The Halloween legend lives on because of three things I knew to be true; Jack McCarver’s body was never found, the blade that did the bulk of his artistry is still missing and I have no idea how thirteen pumpkin seeds ended up in my pocket.

by William Riling

Let me lie with you beneath the stars,

Let lie with you and spoon.

Let me lie with you to heal my scars

And not be torn from you too soon.

Let me lie with you my darling

Let me listen to you breath.

Let me lie with you in soft repose

Pulling love's arrow from it's sheath.

Let me lie here and pierce your heart

With a love that's straight and true.

Let me lie here and hold you dear

As lovers often do.

Let me lie with you in the afterglow

from the embers of our embrace.

Let me lie in the warm radiance

of the smile on your face.

Then let me whisper "I don't love you."

My single rose among the heather.

Tell me you don't love me too,

So we can lie together.

by William Riling

The pearl black Prius slipped through the Uptown intersection slowing to a stop to unload its peculiar passenger. Beneath the fog muted streetlamps, the slim wire frame of Arthur Wellington Kilgore unfolded from the rear seat exiting the Uber. A biting Lake Michigan wind funneled along the empty avenue from the dock at the street’s dead end. The evening gust created eerie whispers from the few city trees still left with leaves. Arthur Wellington Kilgore felt a reflexive shudder, uncertain of the source of the unnerving chill; was it the biting cold or the ghost-like emptiness around him that generated a sense of foreboding?

Standing just over six feet tall, donning his signature bone-white bow tie and suited head to toe in black, Arthur’s countenance was reminiscent of Slender Man, the fictional supernatural humanoid who comes to life in children’s imaginations and nightmares. Arthur’s hair, dyed shoe polish black and combed slick, was styled on the left with a severe part. His Sherlockian nose protruded like an axe blade. His pupils, black as a shark’s eyes were just as unforgiving. Shielded by a rigid brow they were set deep in his angular face taking in every detail of the current environment.

Arthur scanned the deep shadowed alleys that separated the multi-floored buildings lining the vacant block. If not for the bright reds and greens of the hanging traffic signals along with a few electric neon marquees, the tableau suggested more of an ominous horror movie setting. It would prove to be the perfect backdrop for this night; a night Arthur Wellington Kilgore, Chicago’s most well-known food critic and gastronome had a reservation with destiny-- his own and the future fortunes of a gourmet restaurant, the famed Evelyn’s.

With his long arm and large manicured hand, Arthur cinched his jacket at the neck to stay warm. He couldn’t afford to catch cold on this evening of such importance. While his expression implied a grim demeanor, if you knew Arthur, this only meant he was now focusing on his upcoming task. For he performed his job with the solemnity of a Shakespearian actor. Tonight, the stage was set; dinner for one at Evelyn’s, starring Arthur Wellington Kilgore.

Twenty-nine stories up in a high rise located in the heart of North Side business district and only two years in business, Evelyn’s, like most of the top-tier fine dining establishments, counted on Arthur’s annual review to sustain their three-star Michelin rating. With new restaurants springing up all throughout the greater Chicago area, competition cut kitchen knife close. Evelyn’s management simply could not afford to lose their star status. The current owner was counting on a loan for expansion with additional plans to franchise. Interested investors preferred backing winners, not second place also-rans.

For Arthur there was no second-place in this elitist world he fought so hard join. Because of that travail, Arthur was merciless in his verdicts. He sometimes determined the winners solely based on something as obscure as the thread count in a cloth napkin or the ratio of oil to vinegar in a salad. Last year, Evelyn’s passed muster simply on a last-minute ability to amuse the stern critic. Last year’s stellar review and the reasons behind it still lay fresh in Arthur’s mind.

The critic’s high praise came after an evening of dining on a Black Truffle Souffle, Foie Gras Terrine and Muscovy Duck. But the callous gourmand’s favor was truly earned when the master chef indulged what little remained of Arthur’s inner child by serving him an edible balloon for dessert. The dessert, a proprietary culinary novelty, captured the imagination of the public, but most true epicurean’s see it as nothing more than a foodie’s gimmick.

For those not familiar with the playful confectionery, it is a specialty of the house at Evelyn’s. Here, Chef Cristophe Arjou practiced the science of molecular gastronomy, providing the gourmand with culinary concoctions based on the chemistry and physics of food. At least that’s how Arthur described it in last year’s review that placed the elite eatery among the world’s most renown restaurants propelling it to its three-star rating. This was Arthur; dry, almost humorless, with the seriousness of a tax accountant in mid-April.

Chef Arjou himself personally prepared the dessert for Arthur. The bladder, formed from a mixture of inverted sugar and natural fruit essence, is filled with helium. The string for the “balloon” is created from shredded green apple dipped in concord grape extract, then tied to the inflated membrane. Floating above the plate, the dish is served with the fanfare of a birthday cake. When bitten, the sugary confection bursts, releasing the gas. Like cotton candy, Arthur ingested the dessert while fully intaking the helium. This caused his voice to take on a cartoon tone, a cross somewhere between Bart Simpson and Mickey Mouse.

When Arthur spoke, each utterance descended on a tonal scale as he exhaled.

“I am Arthur Wellington Kilgore.”

“I am Arthur Wellington Kilgore.”

“I am Arthur Wellington Kilgore.”

Arthur repeated the sentence until he expelled all the helium, and his voice returned to its original Karloffian tone. The whole experience managed to bring an unnatural chuckle to the stoic critic. It’s the closest he ever came to true laughter, though it was a laughter unshared, for Arthur has no true friends which was why he always sat alone. Patrons at other tables enjoying their meal, caught up with their own conviviality paid him no mind, nor did many recognize him despite the many books he wrote on gastronomy and numerous television appearances.

That was a year ago. Tonight, Chef Arjou would need something truly unique to insure a good review. In cooking terms, Arthur’s mood simmered with a petulance marinating in a reduction of irritability.

Arthur looked back with a shoulder glance checking both directions to see the Prius was gone. The street was completely empty. It struck him odd that he never heard the car drive off, as if it had never been there to begin with. With an impatient shrug he headed for the revolving entrance door to the building. The marquee above the entrance had the restaurant’s name in LED white script reading “Evelyn’s.” Crossing beneath and reaching for the door handle, Arthur stopped dead in his tracks as if he’d hit a glass wall. His nose tilted up, drawing in huge dollops of air.

Swiveling as he sniffed, Arthur smelled something odd. What was it, garlic? Pungent and weighty, the smell infiltrated his nostrils like smoke from an exploded firecracker at the same time delivering a tiny bee sting like feeling deep inside his nasal cavity. Arthur continued, turning in a tight circle, testing the air. Where was that odor emanating from? What could it be? He reached for his handkerchief covering his nose with a wince, “Sriracha!”

At that exact moment at the building’s edge something caught his eye. A man, whose exact age was difficult to estimate, other than old, slowly shuffled, pushing along a vending cart from out of an alley way. The vendor’s umbrella was tied closed due to wind. The wheels of the cart whined and wobbled along the concrete walkway. With his cooking lids locked in place, it appeared to be an end to his long day. There was a large, covered stewpot imbedded into the top of the cart. The steam wafting from it was swept away with each gust of lake breeze. Still, the heavy chili pepper smell of sriracha lingered behind. It was obvious that the food cart was the origin of the attack on Arthur’s nostrils.

Arthur called out. “You there! Stop!” Arthur marched towards the old man’s cart.

The Latino man’s head barely cleared the level of his cooking kiosk. The first thing that stood out to Arthur was the man’s right eye covered by a patch strapped to his leathered face. The pattern on the patch was made up of Aztecan geometric lines on gold felt, accented by a red saffron jewel placed dead center like some kind of evil eye. Facial creases contoured other lines formed from age and struggle. His bright silver hair, drawn back in a ponytail, pulled his furrowed brows into an angle parallel to the open wedge containing his good eye. The shock of white hair contrasting his caramel skin. Despite his pirate like visage, the old man smiled the warm way a grandfather greets a child.

“Can I be to help of you, Señor?” His English was as chopped as the onions in his steaming pot.

“You can’t sell your slop here!” Arthur gestured towards the lake. “Go away, do you hear me? Or I shall report you!” Continuing to wave him off, Arthur’s voice raised. “It’s against the law! Can’t you read?” Arthur pointed to a sign on a pole by the curb. It contained the silhouette of a street vendor with an umbrella cart circled in red. A red slash cut diagonally through the black shape. Above it, large white letters against a deep red background read “NO VENDING ZONE.”

The few food carts in operation in the city could be counted on one hand and were only found in the lower-class sections of town. Arthur knew all too well Chicago had strict laws against street vendors. Arthur, himself, helped push through the discriminate legislation. With just a few heated editorials, Arthur single-handedly put a stop to the street vending business in Chicago proper. He had always given a long look down his nose at fast food and street fare. The laws and regulations he helped push through not only made it hard for some immigrants to make a living. He saw to it so it would create a boundary keeping the “undesirable” in their crime ridden neighborhoods. It was a form of red lining that targeted the poor and cut one more rung from their ladder to success.

Arthur was visibly upset. Prepared to have a gourmet meal at one of the most exclusive restaurants in town his sense of smell has just been assaulted by a stench he could almost taste in the back of his mouth.

The old man’s smile remained as he lifted the lid to a hot tray and removed a corn flour tortilla. He raised the cover to the steamer and spooned out a huge helping of meat infused with a hodgepodge of ingredients, placing it neatly into the breaded blanket. Next, he lovingly set the food in a piece of aluminum foil, wrapping it snug to keep in the heat. Arthur watched like the old man was a street hustler running a shell game.

“What? What are you doing?” Arthur shouted.

“Pruebalo. Taste.” The man’s weathered hands held out the steaming soft taco cradled in foil. “Good.” “Taste.”

Almost instinctual, Arthur slapped it from the man’s hands sending it to the ground in a splatter. “Who the fuck do you think I am, Anthony Bourdain? I don’t eat that street shit!” Through grinding teeth Arthur punctuated his point in a deliberate cadence. “Arthur Wellington Kilgore does not eat junk food.”

The old man’s smile was replaced with a look of confusion, and he quickly started to prepare another taco. Holding out another serving he pleaded. “No. No. Pruebalo. Good. Taste. Recipe, me. Good. Taste.” He then added the Mayan words for eat. “Hanal.” “Comer.” The old man leaned closer. “Cochinita.” The Mayan dish Cochinita is made up with thinly sliced meat of choice mixed with other spices and/or vegetables. In this case, the Cochinita was marinated suckling pig in achiote paste, brown sugar and garlic and so much more.

Arthur smelled the air again and leaned back holding his nose. “Yes, yes. Cochinita. A Mayan delicacy, right? I know, I know.” Arthur extended his other hand out then finger counted the ingredients. “Suckling pig marinated in citrus juice, plus brown sugar, garlic clove…” He sniffed the air again. “…sesame seeds, achiote, cilantro, red onion, and way, way too much sriracha!” Say what you will about Arthur Wellington Kilgore, he may have the heart of a rabid Doberman Pinscher, but he was gifted with the olfactory sense of a bloodhound. Arthur slapped the second taco to the ground.

“I don’t need to taste it. I already can! You’re food cart is like a dumpster fire on wheels. My eyes are watering from that Red Rooster sauce you smother everything in.” Arthur removed a handkerchief to cover his nose. “Take you trash cart away from here before I call the police.”

The old man knew enough English to recognize the word “police.” He hadn’t escaped Guatemala, taken an arduous journey across several countries through jungle and desert to find refuge in America for his family only to feel the boot heel of injustice on his neck again. He got the message.

The old man’s smile left. His brow no longer parallel, creased in anger. The old man bent down holding two paper plates and using them as a dustpan and broom scraped up the two fallen tacos. He deposited the waste into a side receptacle on the cart and wiped down its surface with a towel. He closed his wares one-by-one never losing eye contact with Kilgore. All the while, grumbling in guttural Spanish. His tone steady and firm. The only emotion seemed to be in his good eye which was now locked on Arthur. The man leaned forward again, this time pointing to his eye patch. “Soy Brujo! El Mal de Ojo.” He lifted the jeweled patch revealing the blackness of an empty eye socket surrounded by scar tissue.

The visage startled Arthur, and for reasons unknown, he was compelled to stand and listen. Perhaps a morbid curiosity. Perhaps waiting for his diatribe to raise in decibels to a shout. It never did. The Latino finished, his final words slow and ominous. “Soy Brujo! El Mal de Ojo. Pruebalo.” Arthur recognized the last word spit out like bitter coffee, “Taste.” But his Spanish wasn’t good enough to translate words like “Warlock” and “Evil Eye” and the dozen other curses and epithets hurled his way. The old man lowered the patch then touched his tongue and pointed the moist finger at the stunned critic. “Pruebalo.” “Taste.”

Arthur watched in stunned confusion as streetlights flickered; The marquee and neon signs blinked while a whipping cold wind blew harder off the lake. He felt another blast of icy air snapping him from his almost hypnotic state. Arthur wiped his nose once more and returned his kerchief to his vest pocket. When he looked back, the man and cart were gone without a sound.

Arthur knew what he had to do when he returned to his apartment. He would spend the next day fasting, cleanse his pallet with multiple cups of green tea and perhaps a little purge of this evening’s meal if necessary. He would write and submit his revue of Evelyn’s. Then he would send off an email to his friend at city hall telling him of his run in with the Mexican street vendor.

Arthur took a deep breath through his nose, clearing his senses with the cool air, the deep feeling of righteousness now filling him. Back on mission, Arthur left to do the thing he came to do, his annual review of Evelyn’s. He turned his back to the lake and stepped through the revolving door into the stark art deco lobby of red and gold. Passing a bank of elevators on both sides, Arthur made for the blood red door of a lone elevator by the far backwall. The scarlet doors parted, and Arthur stepped inside. There was no button to press, the elevator had but one destination. The doors closed.

Twenty ounces of rare Waygu Tomahawk steak rested on a sizzling plate, still cooking in its own juices. The expensive Japanese beef, prized for its genetic history, unique flavor profile and tenderness was about to undergo a scrutiny that would make or break the fortunes of Evelyn’s, on Chicago’s North Side, 29 stories up with a city view on one side and Lake Michigan sprawling to the horizon on the other. The upscale restauranteur was celebrating its sophomore year by preparing the menu of a lifetime.

The owner, Chef Cristophe Arjou, artfully plated the premium cut of beef next to a mushroom and truffle pate, lightly dusted with black Kampot Pepper and drizzled with a merlot-infused glaze. It was his signature dish. This evening, it was all in for the neophyte chef. He was playing the highest card he had in his hand with this gourmet meal. After making a once in a lifetime gamble, he sank his life savings into the restaurant two years ago, he had no choice but to pull out all stops. Cristophe hoped to keep his Michelin three-star rating, cementing a place on the map alongside two world renown Chicago dining establishments and competitors, Alinea and Creole. Failure would not be an item on the evening’s menu. That’s why he invited the country’s most read, most popular and most feared food critic to be the guest of honor.

Sitting with linen napkin in place, Arthur Wellington Kilgore’s raised brow indicated he was already evaluating the dish before him for its presentation. Like an art dealer inspecting a painting for authenticity, Arthur noted all aspects of the chef’s design: composition, color, and texture. He hovered above the plate, observing it from different angles, ending with a wafting hand sniff and a near imperceptible nod. Satisfied, he gripped the cutlery with the delicate touch of a surgeon and applied them to the expensive cut of meat. Little downward pressure from his fork was needed. Its tines melted into the meat, while the steak knife slid through the beef like it was room temperature butter. Arthur took the wedge of medium rare steak, skimmed it through the blood juices still roiling on the plate, and lifted it to his lips.

Taking his first bite, one side of his mouth couldn’t help but reveal a hint of a smile. Arthur loved his job. He loved the perks and prestige and the power a food critic of his caliber possessed, but more than that, he loved to eat. Arthur wasn’t a glutton; he wasn’t fat; he wasn’t even a picky eater when the fare was at this high a level. When it came to fine dining, Arthur was precise. He appreciated the culinary arts, and the heights of gastronomical wonder gourmet cooking could achieve. It was a career that brought him light years from the frozen meals, canned goods, and food stamp family fare he was raised on. He had come a long way to reach his station in life, and he planned to exploit it’s every aspect and show no mercy those he considered unworthy.

Taking his first bite, the warmth of the meat filled his mouth. The steak was juicy and tender, not dry or spongy. He savored its natural flavors, a light, almost imperceptible saltiness, the savory natural flavor that comes from blood and the hearty taste given to meat when grilled to perfection. Arthur closed his eyes as he chewed. The flavors washed over his tongue. He thought this had to be the most delicious piece of steak to grace his palate. For a moment, Arthur believed he was in gastronomical paradise. Everything was about to change forever the moment Arthur tried to swallow.

Attempting to ingest the steak, a lightning bolt went off in Arthur’s brain. He would swear he heard the word “Pruebalo” whispered in his ear. His eyes were still closed, but the flash of white inside his head was blinding. When Arthur opened his eyes, he was no longer in the restaurant. He found himself in a large yellow monochromatic cellar pulsating with blinking and buzzing florescent lights. The sounds of animals snorting, and bellowing bounced off the surrounding twenty-foot concrete walls. A procession of cows pressed forward with Arthur near the lead feeling the tsunami-like push forward. Steel dividing rails guided him ahead while hemming him in. The metallic copper smell of warm blood, mixed with cow shit and urine, floated on an undercurrent odor of bleach, filling his nostrils, watering his eyes. Nearby, the pendulum paced noise of hydraulic pressure escaping was punctuated by a loud bang. The explosive sound rattled the very air and Arthur felt it to the bone. Arthur Wellington Kilgore wondered where the fuck he was and where did all these cows come from and why did he feel like he was he crawling on all fours?

Added to the confusion, Arthur felt heavier, as if the gravitational pull of Earth itself increased in degree. He looked down, horrified to see two hooves stumble forward on the wet concrete floor where his hands should be. There wasn’t enough room for him to turn around, but he was quick to surmise his feet were no longer the pair he remembered as they clopped beneath him.

Arthur was certain he was in the middle of a nightmare. From behind, he felt himself shoved forward into a set of hind quarters before him. It was a tidal force pushing him to follow while steel guard rails funneled the rest of the livestock into single file. The space to move narrowed. There were indistinguishable human forms on walkways a foot off the ground on both sides of the cramped hallway. The line stopped. He heard the singing sound of sliding chains and the harsh sound of metal locking on metal within the din. The cow in front shuffled forward a few feet.

Arthur watched in horror as the animal vaulted into the air, screaming. The frightened cow hung several feet off the ground, swinging from its hind legs above a large metal grating. Arthur looked into its eyes now bulging out of its skull in fear. Arthur knew at that moment the beast was aware of what was going to happen next. Before its cry of anguish could finish, a nondescript human form leaned forward holding something, from the back of which a hose ran down and connected to a pressure tank. The form’s fingers tightened on a trigger and with a bang the braying animal went limp. A second human form on the other side of the narrow space held out a knife as long as a baby’s arm. Reaching around to the animal’s throat, it created a slit, opening the neck and releasing a torrent of blood into the grating below.

It took seconds for most of the blood to drain from the dying animal. Hoisted on the conveyor belt, it moved on along, following the scores of other carcasses in the distance. Arthur felt the simultaneous grip of cold steel on both his hind quarters as shackles closed around them. With dizzying speed, he lifted skyward. He felt his hip break and his knees pop from their sockets as blood rushed to his head. Pure fear overrode the signals of pain. He felt motion sickness watching the room swing back and forth while dangling from a conveyor chain. Arthur looked down through the grating as if there were an entity below it awaiting his life force or it was a direct portal to hell.

The human form raised a pressurized captive bolt stunner to Arthur’s face. He tried to scream for them to stop, thinking he was forming sentences; “This is a mistake.” “This can’t be happening.” He even yelled “I’m not a cow.” and “I want my mother.” and a dozen other pleading statements. But all that escaped from his mouth was a guttural bellow that crescendoed into a squeal. Arthur was still swinging on his chain when the human form went to touch the penetrative bolt to his skull. Arthur shook his head then heard the convergence of the air pressure and the loud bang as they triggered the pneumatic stunner. For the second time, Arthur saw a flash. This time, an intense ringing in the ears and a hatchet blow of a headache followed it.

Because he had been swinging, the stunner was off target. Instead of rendering him unconscious, the penetrating bolt had only glanced off Arthur’s cranium. He was still very conscious, and bleeding from the skull and he knew what was coming next. Arthur strained his eyes to look behind him for the second human form, who had steadied him for the death cut. It was here things went into slow motion for Arthur. He watched as a hand holding the long knife blade crossed his field of vision inches below. Arthur saw his reflection for an instant in its stainless-steel blade. The face of mortal fear in the form of a frightened cow looked back at him. Staring into its eyes, Arthur recognized himself. Despite the broken hip and dislocated legs, he tried to twist and turn to avoid the coming blade but felt the ice-cold steel slice across his neck. He felt the flush of blood empty from his head and body. A waterfall of blood splashing below him was the last thing Arthur saw before he lost consciousness.

Arthur next felt a violent thrust against his abdomen. There was no flash of light this time. He came out of the darkness starving for air. He was suffocating. Instead of the slaughterhouse, he was back now watching the restaurant interior tilt up and down, his vision clouded around the edges like a window etched with frost. The expensive Waygu steak lay on the floor amongst a broken plate, shattered glass, and splattered pate. His chair was on its side, as if unconscious.

Arthur was aware of being at the mercy of a python like grip, lifting him up and down like a rag doll. His abdomen felt a second hard thrust. He felt pressure inside his esophagus as his feet touched the floor once more. Another gut-punch lift caused a piece of Waygu steak to fly from his mouth, landing on the table before him. Arthur greedily drew in air like a deep diver surfacing. His ribs ached. His throat ached. He felt dizzy, for the oxygen hadn’t fully returned to his head. Someone righted his chair for him to sit. He surrendered to it and loosened his bow tie, whipping it off and unbuttoning his shirt by the collar.

“Oh, mon Dieu, Mr. Kilgore. Are you alright?” Chef Cristophe knelt, assessing the shaken critic. He had just administered the Heimlich to Kilgore. “We’re calling 911.”.

Arthur spoke almost breathless. “That won’t be necessary. Just some water.” Arthur added, “Not sparkling, and room temperature.” That wasn’t Arthur’s humor coming through. He had none of that. That was his precision in always knowing what he wanted. A server nearby went to fetch a carafe.

Arthur lifted a tremoring hand to his temple. A headache unlike he had ever experienced pulsated and throbbed. “Make it wine.”

“Of course, right away.” Christophe snapped his fingers at another porter. “Wine.”

Before the porter could dart off, Arthur followed up. “Bodega Numanthia, 2013.” Again, Arthur knew precisely that was a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine.

Arthur looked at Cristophe. “What happened?”

Cristophe hesitated, then spoke. “Well, sir, you… you were choking, sir. You passed out.” Christophe tried to gage Arthur’s reaction.

Arthur put a finger to his pulse, then lay a hand to his chest. “I don’t believe it. My…my heart is still beating fast.”

Cristophe reassured him. “Please let us call for a doctor.”

Arthur looked at the partially chewed dollop of meat laying on the table then back to Christophe. “You… you almost killed me.”

“No, sir. You just had an accident. Surely, we are not to blame.”

Ricardo, the maître D, returned with the wine bottle, popping the cork as he arrived. He reached for a wine glass. Arthur intervened. He wrestled the bottle from the Ricardo and guzzled a large swig. He repeated three more huge swallows before setting the bottle on the table by the piece of meat now staining the white cloth with juices diluted by Arthur’s own saliva. Arthur’s senses were returning.

“Could someone please do something about that?” nodding to the morsel of meat.

Ricardo was quick to act. Taking a table crumber, he guided the meat into an awaiting napkin, cinched it like a sack and carried it off.

Christophe snapped his fingers. The porters moved in synchronicity, changing the linen, and setting a new placement. “Mr. Kilgore, sir. Is there anything we can do?”

There was no way Arthur was going to eat another steak. “Exactly what kind of mushrooms did you cook with that steak?” As far as Arthur was concerned, psychedelic mushrooms were the only explanation for his nightmare of horror.

Christophe objected. “Monsieur, I can assure you, I used no strange mushrooms in my recipe and all our food is top of the line, fresh and organic.”

Arthur considered maybe it was his near-death experience that triggered his trip to a Friday-the-Thirteenth-like movie. The chef did, in fact, save his life. He reached for the fresh wine goblet and, with bottle still in hand, poured himself another glass. Arthur raised his favored brow. “Indeed. Well, I am still hungry. Perhaps Chef could prepare a special salad for Mr. Kilgore?” When Arthur spoke in third person, it was to emphasize his comparative importance over common folk.

Cristophe felt a surge of hope. “I have a salad recipe delivered from the gods themselves. Give me ten minutes and…” Cristophe pursed his lips, pinched his fingers and, with a chef’s kiss, tossed them away from his mouth. “… heavenly perfection.” Cristophe made the salad in seven minutes.

Arthur was just finishing the bottle of the Bodega Numanthia when Chef Cristophe returned and set the salad before him. “Goûter.” He smiled and gestured to the salad. “Apprécier.” A small crowd of employees stood round, waiting to see Arthur eat. The eyebrow and a clearing of the throat chased all but Cristophe and the maître D’ away.

The famous salad had been christened “Summer in Provence.” It was another Cristophe specialty. He had once prepared the organic vegan dish for Macron and his wife in Paris. It won three awards in one year. The plating was an artistic tribute to Monet. Arthur would handle the fork like a brush mixing colors on a palette. Hesitant, he bought the fork to his mouth.

Arthur closed his eyes, and a fiesta of flavors danced on his tongue. It was as if the diced beets, chopped cilantro, fresh corn, cracked pepper and green onions, splashed with an apple cider dressing, then sprinkled with freshly cracked pepper, were celebrating Mardi Gras in his mouth. Dopamine signals burst in his brain until once again he heard the whispering word, “Pruebalo.” A flash blinded him. In an involuntary reflex, he dropped his fork and gripped the table sides. Arthur panicked. A thought screamed inside his head. “This can’t be happening again!”

But when Arthur opened his eyes, they were met by a sky of perfect blue stretching out before him. Pillow white clouds drifted westerly, their movement almost imperceptible, and interspersed with flocks of blackbirds. The sun tilting slightly away from its noon perigee was a bright yellow, white, warming his face as a moderate summer wind caressed his cheeks. The air, country clean, washed over him, causing him to sway in a cradle like rhythm. Bird song sounded from a group of trees off to his right sifting the light breeze through their leaves. A lone butterfly danced at eye level above the carpet of greenery blanketing to the horizon. Arthur had never known such peace. He couldn’t help but smile. It wasn’t the child like grin he had from the edible balloon.This was a smile of pure contentment, a comfortable sense of well-being, a calm happiness. For Arthur, this was heaven, he began to hum a tune.

In a nightmare world, Heaven can turn into Hell on a dime. The growing hundred decibel sound of hammering pistons and churning hydraulics pounding over the sound of a droning engine were Arthur’s first clue something was wrong. The sound was coming from behind him, but try as he might, he couldn’t turn to see. He heard another sound closing in. It was the sound of cutting or slicing which Arthur could almost feel getting closer. A frenzy of whipping noises seemed to create a wind, increasing his swaying motion. It was here Arthur could glance behind him and up.

A blood red John Deere combine harvester driven by a nondescript human form was bearing down on Arthur. Heavy blades spun as the teeth of a cutter bar scraped the ground ahead of the machine, tearing up both soil and plant. It’s the first time it occurred to Arthur that he was one of those plants. There was nowhere or no way to run. He tried to scream but couldn’t. Even if he could, the cacophony of chopping sounds married with a motor’s roar would have drowned him out. Arthur felt the cutter dig him out of the soil, root and all. He felt the spin from the rotating blades hurl him onto a conveyor belt. The cockpit of the giant harvester blotted out the blue sky above. Arthur lay helpless as the conveyor carried him up, snaked in a U-turn and deposited him into the grain tank beside mutilated and decapitated bodies of the other plants. Arthur was a just another dying chard. The last glimpse of a patch of blue sky was covered as hundreds upon hundreds of beets joined Arthur in the bin until darkness overtook him. The last thought he had was how he was going to destroy Evelyn’s with a review from hell.

On the twenty-ninth floor of the North Shore high rise, a steady wind coming off Lake Michigan blew into Christophe’s restaurant. Tablecloths clung tight to the table flapping in the breeze. At a window Cristophe stood back several feet, talking to a suited man and a uniformed cop taking notes. A six-foot high by three wide hole in the window had a firefighter leaning forward and looking down. Nearby, the table Arthur Kilgore was earlier dining at, was empty and surrounded by broken dishes and scattered vegetables. The chair once again on its side. Cristophe was explaining the series of the recent event to a detective and police officer.

“I can’t explain it. I set down his salad plate. I said…I said… Goûter…”

The cop was writing as fast as he could. He interrupted. “Gootay?

Cristophe gestured broadly, trying to explain. “Goûter. It means, Taste. It’s French. As I was saying, Mr. Kilgore then took a bite of his salad… by the way, that salad has won me awards!” Cristophe’s agitation grew. “He took one bite, and he closed his eyes and leaned back with the most serene smile I’ve ever seen.” Cristophe took a swig from a bottle of wine. “He… he… he began to sway back and forth. And hum! He was humming a tune. Isn’t that right, Ricardo?”

Ricardo, the maître D’ nodded fiercely. “Si. Si. It was the Carpenters, “Close to You.” He hummed it and then suddenly…”

Cristophe took over. “… Suddenly he shot up from his chair, eyes wide open, and stumbled backwards at full speed. He spun one time and then… and then…”

Cristophe and Ricardo chimed in together, overlapping each other. “He crashed through the window!”

Cristophe continued, “He launched himself without saying a word!”

Ricardo interjected. “No, first he said, ‘Pruebalo’.” He explained. “It too means, taste it.”

Both the detective and the cop stared at Ricardo quizzically. Cristophe shooed him off. “Go see to the kitchen.” Ricardo nodded and scurried off.

Cristophe anguished. “Mon Dieu! I’m ruined! I needed that review!”

The detective took another look at the 29-story drop, his tie waving in the breeze, he stared at the crowd below. He shook his head. “Are you kidding me? Your business will triple. People have a morbid fascination with celebrity deaths. They will line up to see where the most famous food critic in the world took his own life.” He turned to leave. “And if the ghouls ask, just tell them Arthur Wellington Kilgore thought the food was to die for.”

Twenty-nine stories below, the emergency medical team bagged and removed Arthur’s shattered body from the sidewalk. Among the cordoned off crowd witnessing the gruesome “accident” was an old, weathered, one-eyed, Mexican man dutifully tending to his food cart. The smell of the Cochinita filled the air and a line had formed from the morbid onlookers. Evelyn's restaurant’s marquee in front of the building was the last thing Arthur Wellington struck before hitting the pavement now simply read “Evel.” By the curb near the NO VENDING sign, the old man held up a Mayan Taco to the waiting customer. With a smile, and in English, he said softly, “Taste.”