The first of (at least) three sprints telling the same story.
–
It had been May 28th ever since she had knocked that damn glass off the counter.
She’d thought that was why, for a while. Wake up to the same chirpy news broadcast spitting out of the radio enough times, correlation and causation give way to superstition and desperation. But she’d been careful, she’d treated that glass like Ming, and still, she’d woken up the ‘next’ morning to blurts of static telling her the local baseball team had won their game the evening before.
Also in the news had been a car accident on Prince and Fourth. She’d thought that might be the key, she’d tried to stay up through the night, find it, stop it, instead of hearing about it on the radio.
She’d done it, just once. She’d tracked one of the drivers back to the convenience store where he’d picked up his last meal and cornered him in a conversation, delayed him long enough to miss that ballistic appointment. But the moment the clock had ticked over to six thirty AM on a beautiful May 29th, she had snapped from standing on her back porch watching the sunrise to waking up in her bed, and the baseball team had won, and the car accident had had no survivors.
Then she’d spent…she didn’t want to think how long thinking there might not be a way after all. Or, if there was, she wasn’t the one who was supposed to do it. Time loops in movies and the like were always focused on someone specific, someone who had to fix some mistake, save a dead spouse, learn to be a better person. The person who needed to be better in order for them all to move on with their lives might not even have been in that city, or on that continent.
She’d walked through her days – or her day – like a wind-up toy for so long, waiting for them to do it. But then, picking up a list of groceries she’d never bought before for a dish she’d never cooked, just for a little variety, just to not go completely mad, she had seen it.
