Masters of Time by Alesha Escobar

Author:Alesha Escobar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy and science fiction, time travel fantasy, fiction science fiction adventure, collections and anthologies, fantasy 2015 new release
Publisher: Creative Alchemy, Inc.

TURNING THE TIDE

What is it about these Navy guys, with their broad shoulders, gleaming chests, lean bodies, and long muscled arms? And their cigarettes?

With a smile, I regard the two framed vintage photos that bracket the computer monitor on my desk. On the right, Mike Finch, my late husband; on the left, Ernie Dangelo, my new love. Though the photos picture men in their early twenties, they were taken decades apart. My husband’s photo is so old it’s black and white, glossy, with a decorative trim. The newer photo is a Kodachrome, but time has adulterated the colors, making the yellows ochre, the reds dusty rose, and all the greens drab.

Yet there are more similarities than differences. Both men are short-haired and shirtless, those muscular arms resting on knobby knees clothed in fatigues, cigarettes dangling from hands caught for a moment in repose. Despite their rakish sailor smiles, the stress of war furrows their brows and clouds their gaze.

The two finest men I have known. Ah, my dear departed husband. Through a lifetime of service you survived many a battlefield only to die a senseless death, felled by a faceless enemy. Quite a few years older than I, he was bound to pass on before me, but not so soon. We were supposed to grow old together, spend our golden years enjoying the fruits of a lifetime of labor.

And my new love, brow permanently wrinkled, but not by the horrors witnessed during the Vietnam conflict, though they are as fresh today as they if they’d happened yesterday. No, you still reel from the pain of a fractured family.

Not fair. Not fair at all.

If I could, I would roll back time. Then Mike wouldn’t have suffered and died a stupid, wasteful cancer death, and Ernie would once again live the family-man life that he loved.

Lifting my hands from the keyboard, I fold them in my lap and tilt back my desk chair. I think to myself, I could do it. I could turn back time. I’m a novelist. I invent entire universes, events, people so real that my characters have their own fan clubs. If I concentrate hard enough, I could connect with the Universe, put the thought out there with all of my being and with such intensity, that it would become reality. Mike would live a deservedly long life; he’d be robust, energetic. Ernie would find himself in his last home with his boys, even his former wife.

I shudder with a frisson of terror.

What if I am successful? Undoing the events that led to Mike’s premature demise and Ernie’s misfortunes could mean that I would never meet either of them. The very thought makes my eyes sting and squeezes my heart. Am I willing to pay that price for their happiness?

I glance again at their photos, the answer is clear.

I will need to immerse myself completely in my writer “zone” where I tune out the real world and tune in the sights, sounds, smells, and sensation of the one that I imagine.

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