A New Story Most Thursdays

Hello Friends and Neighbors, and welcome to Thursday Stories. Looking back over my herd of short stories, I realize that more than three dozen of the little rascals have appeared only in print. Some of you may have forked over the dough for this or that literary review, but I don’t expect everyone to buy all of the reviews all of the time. And so, drumroll please, I give you Thursday Stories. I’m not guaranteeing a new story every Thursday, but I will do my best until all the print-only tales have been set free.

This week’s edition of Thursday Stories features A Litany of Runimation. A Litany of Runimation first appeared in In Parentheses, published in 2020. Without further ado, I give you another edition of Thursday Stories. I hope you enjoy it.

A Litany of Rumination

By Marco Etheridge

You make an insignificant decision right after lunch, and by bedtime, watching your toothbrush slosh up and down in the bathroom mirror, you’ve forgotten all about it. A year passes, perhaps two. You awaken one sunny morning to find your life altered irrevocably and yet have only the foggiest remembrance of the yes or no that changed everything. The reason you don’t see the change sneaking up on you is because you’re not me. I remember every mistake I’ve ever made, even the very small ones, especially the very small ones.

The receptionist calls me Mister Wagner. With a voice that is beyond sultry, she informs me Doctor Bellman will see me now. I nod and watch the toes of my shoes as I walk past her desk, remembering how horribly I messed up the last time I tried to talk to her.

The Doctor calls me Kyle, and I call him Doctor Bellman. We are engaged in cognitive behavioral therapy, or at least he is. The therapy is supposed to help me become more aware of my negative thinking. Doctor Bellman says that if I learn to view challenging situations in a new way, I will be able to respond more effectively. What I don’t tell Bellman is that the more I examine my negative thinking, the deeper I sink. The deeper I sink, the more I remember.

* * *

A bonfire illuminates a wide circle on a sandy beach. The beach slopes away into darkness to the water lapping the shore of Lake Huron. A circle of teenagers rings the heat line of the bonfire, maybe thirty kids all told. One kid stands just outside the circle, hoping for an invitation, or at least a social wedge to drive between the two pretty girls in front of him. That kid is me.

I edge in another half-step, but instead of making room, the girls turn on me like feline predators, all silk and fang.

— Do you want to stand here? Is that why you’re creeping around behind us?

It’s the taller one, the cuter one, but she’s not cute now, and her words are not an invitation. They ring out across the circle like it’s a theater in the round, cutting through the haze of beer and bud. Everyone is looking at me and laughing, even the kid who invited me and now has to cover his regret.

There was only one thing to do, and I did it, turning without a word, running fast and hard up that dark beach. I trip over an invisible driftwood log and land face-first in the sand. Twenty-two years ago, and I can still taste that grit in my mouth.

* * *

I carry thousands of mistakes like that, each one etched in my memory. What I’ve learned is that most people have a copy of the secret rulebook. They have the book, and I don’t, so they know the rules that I have never seen.

Learning the rules without owning the book is like being an ornithologist on one of those nature shows. The scientists observe the birds from the hidden safety of the blind, taking pictures and making careful notes. Based on their observations, they try to figure out why birds do what they do. Sometimes I know what people are going to do, but I never know why.

Probably the best example I can give you is Lizzie. Liz was my girlfriend for over a year. She still is, I guess, except for the sex part. Not much else has changed.

Her favorite pastime is diagnosing mental illnesses based on information she gleans from the internet. She maintains a keen interest in my issues, as she calls them, while carefully ignoring her own. In Lizzie’s case, that is a lot of ignoring. There’s a clinical word for how she sidesteps her own stuff, but if I use it, she punches me. Lizzie hits hard, and not just for a girl.

Lizzie introduces me as a compulsive, or as her compulsive, as if I were both a separate species and a pet. The way she says it makes me sound like a garden-variety doorknob toucher or hand washer, which I’m not. I’ve explained to her a thousand times that I’m a ruminator, but she just snorts and goes back to her websites.

When the sex thing was still going on, my life was even more complicated. During my sessions, Doctor Bellman prattled on about how I needed to recognize harmful patterns and identify negative thinking. Lizzie declared that Bellman was a quack and insisted I should try vitamin D drops or capsules of valerian root. Maybe the best idea would have been to send Lizzie to Bellman’s office and let the two of them fight it out, but I never had the nerve to suggest it.

It was about this time that I discovered the first tantalizing threads of a solution. The problem was a simple one. I needed to erase all the mistakes from my past; they were the real problem. It was a simple matter of altering the past so that my past did not haunt my present. That’s how I came up with the idea of the time machine.

I know you’re going to roll your eyes about the impossibility of time travel but wait.

I’ve read all the tomes of time travel, from H.G. Wells to the Time Wars and everything in between. I studied the wrinkles, the alternatives, and the severing of time. I kept on reading until I made my first important discovery.

It happened during one of my late-night marathons. There was a click in my brain, the sound of a puzzle piece falling into place. I remembered Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and everything became clear. For more than a century, people have been writing about time travel, different authors from all over the planet. They did not simply imagine it: There must be a way.

The realization that time travel was possible opened new avenues of investigation. I began to see the mistakes that had been made, the common dead ends that could be avoided or circumvented.

Moving an object through time is tricky. Moving a human being through time is even trickier. Einstein showed us how to do it: You have to accelerate someone up to light speed and then shoot them through space. That’s not the sort of technology I could cook up in my bedroom. But what if you could move a person’s consciousness through time? The answer to that question formed the kernel of an idea, the seed of my own time machine.

There is a unifying thread that runs throughout the literature on time travel. It is both a warning and a trope: Altering the past can alter the future. For me, the warning was just another indication that moving through time is possible. Why bother warning the reader if there was no possibility of trouble? Besides, altering the future, my future, was the whole point. Who would want to end up like me?

I tried to talk to Lizzie about it. I persuaded her to read a few of my books, but that was a mistake. I remember her latching onto one story, a romance that sprawled across time. She dismissed the rest as silly and called me silly as well. She kept talking about it for the better part of a week, unable to let it go.

One rainy afternoon, we were trapped in my apartment. Lizzie droned on about the stupidity of time travel until I couldn’t take it anymore. I slipped my headphones on and turned up the volume. That is when I made my second important discovery.

Music has the power to transcend time. What if that power could be harnessed to move us through time? The idea took hold of me, and I began to see that it might work.

I searched for music with a time travel theme, hoping to find some hidden clues. There is a cluster of songs from the seventies, all of them recorded before I was born. The number of time travel songs is large enough to form an anomalous spike on a graph line. I listened to those old songs over and over: Uriah Heep, Queen, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin. After two weeks, I realized that none of it worked. All I managed to do was exacerbate an already bad case of tinnitus.

Then I stumbled onto Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony #3. The first movement held me in thrall, but it was the second movement that began to transport me. A soprano voice floated above the music, and though the words were sung in Polish, the vision was clear to me. I saw a young girl in a Gestapo cell, writing a message on the wall, a message to her parents whom she will never see again.

That was my first small step from theory to application. Music had moved my conscious mind through time. All I needed now was a method to control the when and where of my destination. Like so many other great discoveries, this one came about through a lucky accident. The agent of the accident was my stereo.

My stereo system is built around an old high-wattage amp and preamp that are several decades older than I am. The whole setup is big and clunky. There are heavy knobs made of billet aluminum and indicator gauges that glow in the dark. Tubes glow behind the bacon panels the darkness as electrons course through capacitors.

Many are the nights I have sat in the dark, watching those backlit needles jump from green to red, red to green, as the music pulsed through my headphones. By this time, I had moved on from Gorecki. My brain was filled with the heartbeat of Buddhist monks chanting ancient sutras. The sutras floated back through time, and I hoped that I could float with them.

The basso chanting of the monks was interrupted by a static buzz, one of the stereo’s vintage connections going wonky again. Normally, I would power down the unit, wait for the tubes to discharge, then mess with the cables.

I sighed and rose from my chair without removing the headphones. When my groping fingers found the loose connection, two momentous things happened simultaneously. The chanted sutras thundered through my brain as my fingers opened a new ground circuit for the preamp’s capacitors. A surge of electrons rocketed up my arm and then down through my body to the floor. Then I was gone.

* * *

I’m standing in the front yard of the old family bungalow. Summer sunshine is flooding down over the tableau of our suburban family. My mom and dad are there, my dad holding his old Nikkormat up to his eye. Neither of them seems startled by my sudden appearance, and I realize that they do not see me. I am suspended in a singular and precise moment. And I know exactly what is going to happen.

My little brother is standing on the seat of his tricycle, balancing himself like a midget acrobat. His arms are spread wide, and he is grinning like a baboon. Another boy stands beside the tricycle, the six-year-old version of me. He is jealous that his little brother is hogging all the attention. I see his right foot move as he draws it back to kick the tricycle. I reach out my hand to grip his shoulder. His face turns, eyes peering up into mine, his foot frozen in midair. I shake my head, squeeze his shoulder.

One squeeze on the shoulder is enough to make him understand. The younger me nods, then turns to face the camera. He does not kick the tricycle, does not send his little brother sprawling to the grass. There is no anguished wailing, no angry shouts from my dad; none of that happens. Everyone smiles, the shutter clicks, and the mistake is erased. Then I am back in the present, my body a twitching heap on the living room floor. 

* * *

Morning found me groggy and disoriented. A pounding headache assaulted my brain. My eyes struggled to focus, and yet I was ecstatic. After a massive dose of scalding hot coffee, I began building my time machine that very day.

Machine is not the proper word; time device would be more accurate. My lucky accident proved that music and a controlled electrical charge could alter my personal position in time. I had already figured out the sutra chants, so the music part was easy. What I needed was a calibrated device designed to deliver electrical charges to the human body.

As many psych ward patients could tell you, this is not new technology. Electroshock therapy was all the rage once upon a time. Nowadays, it’s called electroconvulsive therapy, which I guess is supposed to sound better. Electroshock devices zap the patient’s faulty brain with a pulse of electricity. The jolt is low amperage and high wattage, lasting a few long seconds. The blast of juice is enough to rearrange brain function without electrocuting the poor sap between the electrodes. That was exactly the gear I needed to get my hands on.

The Dark Web is an amazing thing. I found a guy who was trying to unload an old Ectron unit for not much money. It was one of the early sine-wave models, dated technology, but it would still deliver the jolt. I forked over my bitcoin and waited for delivery.

Just after my precious package arrived, I opened my big mouth and told Lizzie what I was up to. Besides being giddy with excitement, I needed someone to throw the switch on the shock box. I thought Lizzie might be willing to help me. That was a big mistake, one of my biggest ever.

Lizzie had a complete freakout, worse than anything she’s pulled before. I explained the happy accident, and then I showed her the halo I had built. I was so proud of it, how I had nested the electrodes into an old bike helmet, how my studio-quality headphones fit inside the custom cutouts. I slipped the whole thing over my head to demonstrate how perfectly the electrodes aligned with my temples.

Instead of being happy for me, Lizzie just lost her shit. She ran to the front door, stopped, and spun around. Her fists grabbed two handfuls of my shirtfront, and she shook me. Tears were running down her face. She shouted about an intervention, about calling Bellman, about getting help. Then the door slammed, and she was gone.

* * *

That was about six hours ago. After Lizzie storms off, I make an emergency dash to the electronics store. It is a simple task to wire in a delay timer and a trigger switch. My phone keeps ringing, which is annoying as hell, but I manage to keep working. Now everything is ready. I don’t have much time.

Great explorers don’t hesitate when they embark on a momentous journey. They never give in to the luxury of doubt, and neither will I. How long before someone starts pounding on my door? It’s now or never.

Everything is ready. I settle into my chair with the halo cradled in my lap; breathe in, breathe out, make myself comfortable. The halo fits over my head. I clip the strap under my chin. I press a button on the amplifier, and my brain soars with the pulsing beat of monks chanting in a darkened temple. The music lifts and swells as I check the dials on the Ectron unit. I choose a time and place from my memory, concentrate all my will on that single moment. My hand is steady as I reach for the trigger switch.

Fini

You can find In Parentheses here:

https://inparentheses.art/

That’s it for this week’s edition of Thursday Stories. More stories are coming your way. How will you know when a new story breaks? Glad you asked, Friends. Read On! Drumroll and… Meanwhile, don’t miss any upcoming stories. You can stay tuned for all the latest by following the MEF blog:

https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/whats-new-in-marcos-world-the-blog/

Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred and fifty reviews across Canada, Australia, Europe, the UK, and the USA. Marco’s short story “Power Tools” was nominated for Best of the Web for 2023 and is the title of his latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a ‘Zine called Hotch Potch. In his other life, Marco travels the world with his lovely wife Sabine.

For more reading, how about a collection of short stories? A Litany of Rumination appears in my short story collection The Wrong Name. Grab your copy today!