Time Passages

“Can you see it now?” Ted’s said. He’d discreetly slid another crisp twenty dollar bill across the dark green tablecloth. His voice was calm, though inside he was about to grab the old gypsy woman by the collar and lift her out of her chair.

She ignored his query, her leathery creased hand busying themselves with a pile of tiny bird bones. Her hands were odd in that the fingers were extraordinarily long and desiccated like an Egyptian mummy only recently uncovered. Ted, like most people, had seen pictures - high resolution 4K pictures in fact. She tossed the bones and then finding one out of place, gently nudged it for effect.

“Nothing yet,” she mumbled. She drew a breath slowly, laboriously. “A flash you say,” she paused, “An explosion?”

“A big fucking explosion!” Ted barked, then covered his mouth like the word could be absorbed back into the skin on his palm.

“Yes, it would be very big … would kill many people … it would be in all the papers.”

That’s if any papers were left, he thought darkly to himself.

“Do you see anything and particularly, when it might have happened, exactly?”

“There is much death left over,” she said. Then she coughed with a rattle like the death rattle of a deer Ted once shot. “The war’s just done too much … too much pain … too many spirits to see that far ahead.”

"God!," Ted thought. That’s for damn sure! How many wars had there been between 1923 and the one in 2023. WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq 1 & 2, and those were the one’s he could roll off the top of his head.

“It’s about a hundred years from now. There was an initial explosion in Ukraine but I don’t know anything after that.”

Ted knew he sounded daft. He was asking about times he’d lived in; times the woman couldn’t possibly know about, but he was desperate … desperate to get home. That is, if there was a home to get back to. Ted had been monitoring the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Ukraine. A contractor of sorts, or the Project Manager of one in any case. Something down low for people that were interested in the site. There were reports that someone was going to blow it up and blame the Ukrainians … or the Russians … didn’t matter, both sides were working the straw. Ted and his crew didn’t much care which it was either. To them it was their Shangri-La, their one time to shine, or in this case, the one time to prove that time travel was possible.

At least on paper, to Ted’s fake war contractor team of physicists, it looked like a mirror of strange dimensions and qualities could be fashioned such that the explosion of a low yield warhead could be syphoned off and used to jump start a shift into the future. That was what they’d planned anyway, and that’s what had torn Ted away from 2023. The only problem was he’d had the vectors wrong and they all pointed in the wrong direction. He’d landed in 1923 and that’s were his modern ass currently stewed.

“Nothing,” she said, and coughed again … then.

“Yes,” her gummy eyes widened. “It’s in August … like the first great war. You have to give me time though. I must rest … recuperate. There is much that blocks this time you want to know about.”

Ted stood, placing his chair back, tucking it snuggly against the little ‘fortune telling table’ in the dark room the old woman ran her business from.

“I have to go,” he said, and a second later she was alone with her thoughts.

She’d seen the flash … the explosion as he’d put it. Then she’d heard a great waling, like a worldwide exclamation of “Not Again!” But even she couldn’t see beyond that.

* *

“Did your gypsy tell us what to tune the concentrator to, exactly?” Jimmy said. His tone was condescending, but frank as well.

“And while I was gone … what … you came up with some great ideas … or you just practiced what you’d say to me when I got back?”

Ted’s words were biting with the possibility of violence, if the answer wasn't just right.

“We have to deal with the reality that we’ll simply live out our lives here,” Dan said. He was sitting on one of the ratty pieces of furniture they’d scrounged enough money to buy. It was a couch, 20’s style, but already worn and discoloured.

It was just what Dan would be expected to say; old reliable Dan. The guy that cut through all the bullshit. He wasn’t exactly positive, but he was practical and transparent as saran wrap.

“Hey, we can try to stop WWII,” Jimmy chimed in. He was looking absently out of the 2nd story window, nervously scratching at the dried, cracked paint on the sill.

“That would be cool,” Ted agreed. It seemed the tension was waning.

“We could get rich by betting on games we know the winners to,” Dan said smiling, now using a grin you only saw him with after a few beers.

“Hell, with enough money maybe we could design something to get home!”

“Nah,” was the general consensus. It was like a sigh of relief; an admission of a decision to go forward and screw dithering with what they knew was hopeless.

There was a sound of shuffling feet outside the door and then …

“Hello, is anyone inside? It’s Nessie, I’m here to collect your laundry.”

All three men suddenly had grins on their faces. Nessie was a washerwoman, someone who washed the clothes and sheets for everyone in the tenement house. Her real name was Betty but someone had dubbed her Nessie because she was small and could disappear like the creature in the nearby lake.

“I could also get married and have a ton of kids,” Dan speculated.

“Not if I get her first!" Jimmy spat.

Ted opened the door to the sweet face waiting outside.