An elderly woman boards a train and slowly realizes the passengers look strangely familiar.

A profound certainty settled upon her: she had been granted a reprieve, a chance to edit the archives of her soul. She had to get off the train.

She quickly rose, fueled by a strange mix of terror and liberation, and pulled the emergency cord. The train shuddered violently and screeched to a halt. The passengers—her Father, Eleanor, her younger Husband—didn’t stir. They were frozen in their time-specific vignettes.

She burst onto the foggy platform and found herself immediately in a small, cramped office, instantly recognizable as the old, temporary annex her Husband had been using in 1983. Her thirty-something self was there, sitting hunched over a cluttered desk, a telephone receiver pressed to her ear, tears silently tracing paths down her face. She was listening to her father lay out the stringent terms of the loan.

The elderly woman moved to the desk, her invisible hand reaching for the receiver. Her younger self looked utterly defeated, about to murmur the word, “Yes.”

“Don’t,” the elderly woman whispered, her voice husky with decades of regret. She knew her younger self couldn’t hear her, so she relied on the logic of the memory. She needed to introduce a new, disruptive element into the scene. She found a small, unmarked key on the desk, a key she recognized as the one to the old lockbox where they kept their emergency travel savings—the money they had scrimped and saved for years.

Continue reading…