A Second Chance for Yesterday by R. A. Sinn

Author:R. A. Sinn
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction
Publisher: Solaris

QT.00.00.09.10.09.2045

“Is everybody happy?”

The little boy’s voice called out, waking Nev from wherever she existed between conscious intervals. Her eyes sprang open, staring blindly in front of her as Donny and Jimmy Osmond’s warbling voices burst into the familiar refrain of ‘Me and My Shadow’…

Nev grabbed her viz and threw it at the floor. The music stopped. She wasn’t sure if she had broken the headset, and in that moment she really didn’t fucking care. After all, it would be magically returned to its former unbroken state the next morning.

It was no use. The alarm stopped but the Osmonds continued singing away mercilessly in Nev’s sonic memory. She had told her troubles to some soul, and it had been like pulling the cork loose from a bottle. Memories of Faith had come pouring out, taking over her mind—and apparently, somehow, her viz alarm as well.

She and Faith used to sing the song as a duet at the family piano. The Osmonds were one of the few pop music acts that Christina Bourne allowed her daughters to listen to. She and Nev’s father had seen Donny and Marie perform in Las Vegas on their honeymoon, making a special trip to sin city for the show, back when Christina was still willing to bend a little. There was no more bending by the time Faith was born, but the Osmonds were still permitted. At age fourteen, Nev would rather have pierced her eardrums than listen to their saccharine bubblegum pop. But for the sake of Faith, who listened to the Osmonds without complaint, like she followed all their mother’s dictates, Nev was willing to make a sacrifice. She would do anything to make her sister happy, even subject herself to voluntary musical torture. In the years since she’d lost Faith, she couldn’t hear the Osmonds without collapsing into tears, but thankfully that wasn’t that much of a problem, because no one but her mother listened to them anymore.

Nev wondered if her mother still did, or if even she had stopped playing the Osmonds by this point. Nev wouldn’t know. She had run away from home after Faith’s funeral, sleeping in the bushes by the river that ran through town before Grandma was brave enough to take her in, against her daughter’s express wishes. For the first time, Nev had gone to public school, busing to Pullman High in the nearest big town. She got an after school job in Pullman too, working the front desk at the Holiday Inn Express, which was slow enough that she had plenty of time to study and make up for lost years. Her hard work paid off. She got a full scholarship to Stanford, and left Washington behind her, literally never looking back. Christina would have said something about Lot’s Wife, but then again, from her perspective, Nev had run towards Sodom, not away from it.

Ever since the Glitch, though, Nev seemed to be looking back more and more. It was hard not to, when, despite all her and Airin’s hard work, she was hurtling towards the past with seemingly unstoppable velocity.

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