Corina, Corina
by G.C. Dillon
Finish What You StartedThe challenge: to search though long-abandoned story ideas and find one that could be turned into a flash piece. Authors had to submit the new story and the original idea.
I had to go to her funeral. It wasn't just to honor her and the fact that she had lived to the age of one hundred, but because I'd known her for all of that century.
Tuesday had been like any other day going to the safe house. That is until I saw the police car, the ambulance and the EMTs roll out a sheet-covered form from her huge Victorian. It was just across the street from my hideaway. I'd gotten off the bus and looked around the town. The bus followed the old trolley line, and the pharmacist and coffee shop had changed into a CVS and a Starbucks across the years. The local bakery had become a Tim Hortons. Change is natural, I guess. And its my job to make sure that when things change in time, they do, in fact, change naturally. I turned and began my short walk to the safe house, a bolt-hole safe from the Time War.
I had a few bottles of Louis Koch Lager from Missouri 1934 to do a taste test with his great-great-grandson's take on the recipe. I needed some fun as I was returning from a wild assignment to a time-line in which Ben Franklin had been treated fairly by Parliament when he first voiced nascent American grievances. He never radicalized and became the voice of change in England. He was eventually rewarded with being the first Royal Governor of the United Colonies of America. The small button for the doorbell measured out the curls and swirls in my fingerprint and hidden cameras struggled to recognize my face. The lock clicked open loudly, as I stood staring at the scene at her house. Neighbors and some of her children stood around anxiously. Her daughter looked to be crying. I knew I had to go to her funeral.
***
"Sir, there's a turtle trapped under Mr. Sumner's fence. Please, we have to save it." I looked down to see a young girl dressed in a plain brown dress. Her black hair hung down in twin pigtails. Her hands had mud on them and the dress was streaked with dirt – much to her mother's coming distress in this age of washing boards and clothes lines. I believe I still had some of Troy's soil under my fingernails.
"Do I know you, young lady?" She was maybe five years old.
"I'm Corina," she said, "from over there." She pointed to her house. "But there's a turtle trapped in the fence by the stream."
"Okay, let's go. We have a rescue to do."
***
"There's a zaftig, even in that shape," Perreault said
I looked up from my book to see our new neighbor arrive. A pregnant woman exited the Model A. Her fastidiously dressed husband held the door. A horse drawn dray, piled precariously with furniture, followed it. "I think that term's about twenty years too early. The haberdasher and his wife are going to have a child, and they need a bigger home."
"They could fill that house with an entire brood."
"The child's name will be Corina."
"Was that in the briefing?" He smiled and rubbed his newly grown hand beneath the bio-glove he wore to protect the injured body part. His old hand was blasted off at Second Bull Run.
"No, I've met her. Or I will in time."
"Do tell!" He smiled salaciously.
"It's not like that," I said.
***
"Do you think electing Mr. Roosevelt will help out the working people? My John is only on half wages at the mill, and we are lucky he has that." I'd met her on the street and offered to walk her home. After all we lived on the same block. She mumbled something about being a married woman, but handed me her groceries to carry. I think her smile was coy, too.
"I think he'll do fine." That is if FDR survives Zangara's assassination attempt. He didn't in all time-lines.
"My father says he's a Bolshevik." She laughed, freely and sweetly. I laughed, too.
"And here, I take my leave of you." I tipped my fedora to her.
***
She was surrounded by a group of kids on primitive bikes. She wore her hair long and carried her "high school" books close to her chest. She looked scared.
"Boys. Is there a problem?" There were four of them, ten years younger than I was, and probably faster. But untrained, I thought, my feet facilely stepping into the Crane stance, my hands becoming ready. The biggest one looked strong from work on his family's farm. I'd bloody his nose first. Hopefully worse. Farmboy tossed down a hand-rolled cigarette, and they rode away.
"Thank you," she said. We talked about her education a bit. "I'm going to the Normal School." I smiled. That institution would become a teachers college, state college, and then state university. But she would never graduate. Both a young beau and the Great Depression would see to that. Then children, then the exigencies of life.
***
My remembrances at the funeral stopped when a young woman approached me. "Excuse me. You're the nice man aren't you?"
"What?"
"You know: I only half believed her stories. Thought they were senile dementia or Alzheimer's. I mean how could she know a 'nice man' who never ages all through her life. You know: an old woman's fantasy. But here you are. I can't believe it."
"You must have me confused with someone else," I stuttered.
"No, I don't. I'm Corey. Really Corina on my birth certificate, but everyone calls me Corey." She did look the same: the face the same oval, the eyes the same brown, the figure curvy but svelte, though the hair was dyed blonde and her fingernails were a jet black.
"Hello, Corey. Would you like some coffee?"
"I'd prefer a drink. And I do need to get away from the loving embrace of my family. At least the embrace without Grams."
We left.
Idea
Sci-fi romance story. A time traveler stays in a contemporary house between assignments.
Across the way he keeps meeting a girl - as a child, a teenager, a married woman, an old woman. At one point he saves her from bullies.
They meet in his chronological order, not hers, and develop a platonic romance/relationship.
He goes to her funeral and meets her great-granddaughter.
They talk with the suggestion of a non-platonic relationship to come.
Use alternate history time-lines to pepper the time traveler's time away from the house. e.g. Franklin does well before Parliament Council and becomes voice of reason between Sons of Liberty and Parliament, eventually becoming King's charge d'affairs in America.
Start with time traveler getting off bus seeing changes to town: no pharmacy - CVS, no coffee shop - Starbucks, no bakery - Dunkin Donuts or Tim Hortons. He has the beer Sam Adams came from, wants a taste test. He sees the EMTs take her out, and begins remembering.
© 2007 G.C. Dillon
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