A Time And A Place

“Jack! Get over here!”

Dean’s holler echoed through the dense trees and Jack abruptly sprinted towards the sound of his voice.

“What even is that?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know but it looks important doesn’t it?” Dean replied.

Jack shrugged his shoulders as they both began to examine the large box in front of them. What sat before them was some rusted piece of metal that looked like it had been buried in the soil for decades.

With the box still wedged into the ground, Dean began trying to pry it open. As Jack watched Dean attempting to open this box with his pale and skinny arms, he pondered how something like this could have gone unnoticed.

He and Dean had been rummaging through that forest since they were barely five years old.

“How come we haven’t ever found this before?” Jack asks.

“Maybe the storm last week washed some of the soil away or something, I don’t know,” Dean replies.

“Well don’t just stand there, help me get this open.”

Jack knelt down and they both began to dig their fingers under the lid and pull as hard as they could. Their fingers turned bright red and after about thirty seconds of pulling and grunting they both lost their grip.

Landing aggressively on his back onto a protruding tree root, Jack became frustrated and angrily yells, “Should we go home and get a crowbar or something? I’m not going to sit here all day and scratch myself up for some rusty box.”

“No, let’s try it again,” Dean insisted. “What else do you have to do today?”

They both crawled through the damp soil covered with fallen leaves and grabbed on tightly to the top of the rusted container with their cut-up hands. With all four of Jack and Dean’s ripped-up sneakers planted onto the ground, they both chant,

“One, two, three, pull!”

Dean grunted so loudly it turned into an awful scream and the beads of sweat sitting on Jack’s forehead began to pace down his cheeks.

The lid of the box made a slight movement at the corner.

“Almost there, keep pulling!” Dean yelled.

As the box slowly inched open, the rusted screws let out a large screeching sound like nails on a chalkboard. Finally, the lid of the box flew open and darted across the creek next to them landing in a half bare bush.

Both of them fell backward at what seemed like a hundred miles an hour, hitting their head on the jam-packed mud.

“Thank god!” Jack exclaimed.

“Let’s take a look,” Dean replied.

They grabbed one another’s hands and pulled each other off the ground. Jack brushed the leaves and clumps of dirt off of his shirt as Dean scurried over to the box.

Jack slowly peeked his head around Dean’s mop-like hair to find out if all that work was worth it, but there was nothing inside of the box except a small white button and a pile of dead leaves.

“Well, that was uneventful,” Jack said with the annoyed tone of an angry toddler.

“Wait there are words at the bottom,”

Dean began shoveling out the leaves that seemed to never end until finally, a sentence engraved into the box was revealed.

They both spent a second reading the thinly carved letters until finally,

“A time and a place?” Jack mutters while tilting his head to the side in a confused manner

“A time and a place,” Dean reads as he tries to make sense of what is in front of him.

They both sat there for a minute imagining what the point of this box is and why there is a button in the middle of it with the simple words, “A time and a place.”

“What could that mean?” Dean asks.

“Maybe we just say a time and place we want to go, press the button, and it will magically take us there,” Jack replies jokingly.

Dean looked up at him with a slight smirk on his face.

“That was obviously a joke Dean, that’s impossible,”

Dean looks back at the box and repeats the words, “A time and a place,” followed by a short pause.

“Well, where do we want to go?”

“Home.” Jack quickly says.

“Don’t be boring, just think of somewhere and we will try it, what’s the worst that can happen?” Dean says.

“Fine… I don’t know. New Years’ Eve 1999? We weren’t alive for that and we probably won’t be alive for the next turn of the century. ”

“Okay sure, but we should probably say it at the same time or something,” Dean replied.

“Jesus. Okay, are you ready?”

“One, two, three.”

Jack and Dean both synchronize their voices and mutter the words, “New Year’s Eve 1999” followed by Dean’s finger gently pressing the small white button inside of the metal encasing.

In a matter of milliseconds, a burst of light flashes through the trees, and a gust of wind circles through the air.

Covering his eyes with his elbow to block the light, Jack screams, “What is happening! What is that!”

“I don’t know! What do we do!” Dean yells backed.

Jack looks down at the dirt and leaves that once surrounded his feet only to find the ground changing continuously beneath him. The two of them lock eyes in utter disbelief. Dean reaches down to try and pick up the leaves but they quickly disintegrate into sand. As he reaches down to pick up the sand it quickly turns to snow as if they were traveling all around the world in a matter of seconds. Everything was changing so fast around them they had no idea where they were or when they were. Dean attempts to look around but his eyes were almost forced shut by the bright light shining on top of them.

But suddenly, the chaos is followed by abrupt silence and everything turns pitch black

“What the hell. Where are we?” Jack says as an echo surrounds the both of them.

“It’s so dark I don’t know,” Dean replies with a quiver in his voice.

Jack began to shuffle around in the darkness looking for anything to give him an idea of what just happened. All he could feel was hard, cold metal.

“Wait I think I feel a doorknob behind me,” Dean says as he blindly wavers his hand around.

“Got it!”

As Dean kicked the door open they are greeted by horns so loud it could burst an eardrum, the smell of gas and trash, and bright neon lights shining above them.

The two of them quickly jumped out the doorway and bumped aggressively into a stranger who yelled, “Watch where you’re going why don’t ya!”

Jack and Dean spun around aggressively trying to get a sense of their surroundings. Neither of them could believe their eyes.

“Yellow taxis, the bright neon lights, all the people walking around us. Jack, we are in New York. We’re in Times Square! Look at the billboard!” Dean says while pointing up to a bright billboard that read, “The new millennium countdown”.

Jack’s face became limp and pale and his jaw had fallen to the ground in complete shock.

“It worked, it really worked!” Dean exclaimed.

“But how! How!” Jack yelled.

“I don’t know but imagine everywhere we can go and everything we can do with this thing! We are literally time travelers!” Dean yells while jumping up and down in excitement.

“Wait, Dean,” Jack says with his eyes open as wide as humanly possible and a ghostly look on his face.

“What, what!” Dean replied.

“Where’s the box.”