The Selah Branch by Ted Neill

Author:Ted Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tenebray Press
Published: 2018-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

“And so, apparently, I’m a time traveler,” Kenia said in finality. She was at the kitchen table in the Pennels’ home. After all, they had been the only ones to see the phenomenon firsthand. She owed them some explanation, and her mother had urged her to find allies. But after sharing what she knew, and sitting in the pregnant silence that followed, she felt like a fool, waiting for their reaction and wondering if her own partial explanations were convincing. Why did the backdrop have to be a kitchen of all places, so ridiculously prosaic a setting for a testimony of ancestral gifts, spiritual beliefs, and the violation of the laws of space-time.

But whether they thought Kenia a fool or credible, the Pennels didn’t show it. Austin was impossible to read. Kenia imagined he was already contemplating where the nearest mental hospital might be. Shane looked straight out the window, his eyes unfocused. Stan’s head was down, his brow furrowed as if in the throes of a difficult math problem. Hailey alone was looking at her with a measure of compassion. She reached out across the table for Kenia’s hand, took it in a firm grip, and showed no sign of letting go.

“Please, somebody, say something,” Kenia pleaded.

Stan spoke first. “I . . . I can’t explain it, but then again, if I could, I’d have a Nobel Prize. But I can offer theories.”

“Wave function?” Shane turned to him, a questioning look on his face.

“Yeah, it’s the only sort of explanation I can think of that makes any sense, but there is still so much we don’t know. So much of the physics are still being worked out, even now.”

“So you believe me?” Kenia asked, hope and relief mingling in her chest. Her stomach felt light.

“Yeah, of course. I mean, we all saw you disappear, Kenia. That doesn’t just happen,” Stan said.

A tear escaped from Kenia’s eye. “I thought I was crazy.”

“We didn’t think you were,” Hailey said. “Then we all would be.”

“No, not crazy,” Stan said. “Not crazy at all. It’s actually . . . well you have to make a couple of assumptions that have yet to be proven in physics . . . but considering what we observed, such assumptions might be in order. It would appear that for some unexplained reason, Kenia, you are jumping among different possible realities, different timelines.”

“Or different points on the same timeline before it diverges with others,” Shane offered.

“We’d have no way to know that,” Stan countered.

Kenia tried to remember what she could of physics, but it was not much more than force was equal to mass times acceleration, Newton having three laws, and the relativity of time

—but that was knowledge gained more from watching sci-fi movies than Mr. Edmond’s high school Physics class. Her AP classes had been in chemistry and biology, things she thought would help her with a major in public health. “I know time is perceived differently depending on your speed, that’s an old sci-fi movie staple. I do remember my high school physics teacher saying nothing can move faster than light.

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