The Traveler

Perhaps, the question

is not of who we are in our minds

but instead where we have wound up to be?

Poetry.com/poem/1809094...

The old elderly man got out of the cab and slowly walked up the steps to the hospital. He stopped at the information desk and asked. What room is Althea Martin in? When they asked him who he was he replied. “I'm a relative, a close relative.”

The nurse looked stunned. “What?” He asked.

“Well it says in her records she had no living relatives.”

“I've been away.” He replied.

*****

Glowing light was all around him as he approached the veil. He could feel the charge, he heard the static sizzle, it was like bacon frying in a pan. He remembered the words of hope and dismay. Minute by minute the silvery sheen changed to gold. Anna had warned him. “We can get you there but I'm not sure we can get you back. Everywhere you go you will be someplace that you have never been, but you will be in the body of someone that has. There is no going home.” She said, “Your DNA will be altered, you will be a hitchhiker aware of everything, but kind of in a bipolar state of mind. Now your family comes from the gulf state region, Baton Rouge I believe?” She asked.

“Yup!” He said. “They were all shrimpers.”

He dropped his backpack to the ground and loosened the flaps digging inside. He had this ancient newspaper that his mother had stored in her attic for years. In it was the article about his father and those from his unit missing in action in Vietnam.

It was now just a shade before 9:00 AM. Hundreds of geese flew over his head stringing out in a loose V. They flew thousands of feet above him, but he could still hear the labored motion of their wings as they went up and down. These things were new to him; the only place you saw geese anymore was at the zoo.

Just as he started along a narrow trail through the woods, he was halted by movement in the bushes ahead of him. It was so exciting you never knew what you were going to find here in this place. He knew he had to be extremely careful about any personal contact. He couldn't interact with anyone for at least seventy-two hours that would give the machine a chance to lay down permanent pattern buffers. Until then he would be slightly out of phase with that timeline and anything could happen if somehow that got screwed up. Like maybe his head would be projected onto a cow while his body ended up with a tiny, little frog's head lying in a marsh somewhere covered in ooze. Or perhaps he would become a ghost only detectable by a blur of motion out of the corners of their eyes. He would appear without substance or form to anything living in other words, just wavy lines easily dismissed as a heat mirage or high humidity.

He wasn't that impressed that his last night in his own timeline was spent in his tiny room while Anna briefed him on every possible disaster that might befall the first time traveler. Doctor Anna Saltzman had always been straight with him. “Time is like a trickle of water down a hillside. Any variation no matter how slight may change its final destination, trapping the traveler in a time paradox. We can bring you back as long as a paradox does not complicate things.”

He didn't care; he had no reason to return to this timeline. The only family he had was his mother and today was her birthday. She was only seventy, but she had Alzheimer's and she wouldn't even know he was gone. It was sad how the disease robbed her of everything precious in her golden years.

For thirty years his mother had made it possible for him to live out his dreams and now that he had a chance to pay her back, she didn't even know who he was.

Angels ten thousand guarded the bridge of sighs none would know its secrets, none would know its lies. A bay to the winds of future's past where no traveler would ever be. Looking back over the dark fields of the years he had traveled he had found no solace, but something was there he could feel it.

It chased him across an Einstein-Rosen Bridge and was still with him. He could catch fleeting glimpses out of the corners of his eyes. Something dark and horrible too ghastly to imagine. Where he could see a white light ahead he could only see darkness behind. It was like time was erasing his wake so no trace of him would exist.

Suddenly this little white fuzzy thing with long ears burst out of the bush and looked up at him with this live and let live look in its eyes. Of course he knew that it was a rabbit. He had seen one in a book once but he had never seen one in real life. It was stunningly beautiful and it brought tears to his eyes. And then there was only darkness. It ran out of its eyes, nose, and mouth like a thick black mucus. It was steaming hot and it burned the ground wherever it hit. Plants, grass, and trees shriveled as it oozed over them like an oil spill.

As he looked on in horror the shadow shifted itself to fade with the night and then it seemed to sprout these massive black wings like a huge manta in flight and in an instant, it was gone. Had that horrible creature been stalking him through time? He feared it was so. It had been created to fill the void that had been Mother Nature? Evolution along with the arrogance of man had brought about her demise. Forest and meadows had made way for fruit trees and manicured lawns; even weeds had been

miniaturized to serve man in hundreds of varieties of grass seed. All made of paper and plastic.

He had only taken a few steps beyond where he had spotted the rabbit when in the distance he could hear dogs barking and his forest trail ended in a pile of branches and leaves. It was a dead fall. He had read about one in a story by Stephen King one time. It had been required in high school.

He stepped out into an open field and he could see two dogs running wildly through the wet grass. They were running his way and having a great time. He thought of the dogs back in his own time which always had to be on chains and their poop had to be scooped into plastic bags which was worse then just leaving the poop to degrade naturally. Little tiny rat-like creatures, but these dogs running free were huge compared to them.

To his right he could see an old busted down blue pick up and a wood shack with smoke coming out of a metal pipe on the roof. It was what his mother used to call a hunting cabin. He knew this place his mother had brought him there after he went missing to pick up his fishing poles and guns. It looked smaller and much newer now.

He watched the dogs romp around through the grass but suddenly they stopped and turned their attention on him. The looks on their faces changed to what he could only describe as a hungry predator look. He realized in an instant that the pattern buffers had worked and he was in the body of maybe a twenty-one or twenty-two year old male. He had no idea without a mirror who he was, but the dogs seemed to know him as they came charging at him.

He didn't know dogs in his time; you had to be rich to own a dog. He had no idea whether they were in attack mode or romp and play mode but they scared him to death. There was nowhere to run, just open fields all around him. If he tried to run they would surely run him down and eat him. He had read where they used to run deer down and devour them whole.

As they got closer sweat popped out on his brow. His head was in panic mode so he squatted down and grabbed a big rock. He cocked his arm back terrified, not sure what he should do.

All of sudden they both took a guarded stance and started barking like crazy. Just then somebody stepped out of the cabin and called the dogs. It was a very pretty young woman with jet black shoulder length hair in a pink flowered dress. “The food is getting cold,” she said.

A part of him which was more of a reflex said. “Your fried chicken is great either way honey I'll be right there.”

Suddenly he knew who she was; it was his mother when she was young. A part of him wanted to hug her and never let go, but he wasn't him at least not in a physical sense. So who else would love her so much?

Instantly he turned to the dogs and said. “Cain and Abel, who are you barking at? Let's go! Come on guys!”

As he walked across the field to the cabin his muscles were tense because he was rapidly approaching reality. He had seen the inside of an Einstein-Rosenberg Bridge it had brought him there and now he was its bitch forever. He knew he had to follow it to the end because it was the only pathway left open to him. Anna had been right; he had seen what the dark-manta like creatures could do. They destroyed the old currents of time while he was making new ones.

The minute he met her at the door, and she came into his arms he knew. She handed him the day's mail and in the stack was a letter with Uncle Sam on it. It said Greeting! He knew now that he was his father, a man he had never met and that his Mother had only one precious week before he was drafted and then listed as MIA. His mother had raised him alone and never married again. Sometimes he would see her sitting on the edge of her bed looking at a picture of them sitting in the back of an old blue pick-up and a hunter's cabin in the background. They had been taken here. When he didn't know.

“Oh my god!” He thought as panic took hold. He couldn't make love with his mother, that was disgusting. There was only one thing he could do: he had to leave, go away, and never see her again.

“But wait!” He thought. If his father didn't impregnate his mother. If he just disappeared and waited for Anna to bring him back she never would because he would never be born. He was caught in what Anna had called a time paradox. This would surely end the project. If there ever was a project because he had been one of the founders. He had been the one that had brought Anna into it.

As they ate dinner, he decided there was no other choice, and he prayed his mother would not choose to live her life alone. As they sat in the back of the blue pick-up and watched the sunset she said. “I want to take a picture.”

She quickly set up the tripod and the timer and they climbed into the back of the truck. There was a flash and then she put everything away. “I'm going to take a shower. Are you coming?”

“Give me a minute,” I lied. I really meant give me a lifetime.

“Kissing me on the cheek she said, “okay.”

An hour later as I walked through the fields I heard the lonely hoot of an owl and thought sometimes I feel like a motherless child.

I walked over to her grave and I dropped a single rose on her coffin. As I stood there, I pulled a clean white handkerchief out of my suit coat. Don’t all elderly men carry hankies? I wept for the child she never knew and said,

“I'm sorry mom.”

THE END

Bio: Timothy Wilkie is a local hero in the Hudson Valley. From his music to his art and storytelling. He's an old hippy and a storyteller in the truest sense of the word. He has two grown sons and loves to spend time with them. His writing credits include Aphelion, Horror-zine, Dark Dossier and many more.

E-mail: Timothy Wilkie

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